Minä puhun vähän suomea

Remember how I'm taking two Finnish classes here? After three weeks of frustration and feeling that it would never come, I can now officially say that I wrote my first paragraph in Finnish. 

I was so proud of this until the teacher corrected it...

And I can conjugate verbs and am beginning to understand all the endings people add onto words. I obviously can't understand or even follow conversations, but I can talk "pleasantries" and every now and then during a patient interview I recognize a few words and can understand the general topic. From that and by observing body language, I really have been able to understand the things that people are concerned about when talking to the nurse/doctor. It's quite amazing. I don't expect or even anticipate that it will come easy, but I have to say I'm really proud to have come this far in just 3 weeks. 

We have a test next week in the Finnish class that Leena signed me up for (the one that's been meeting since November), but we were doing the exercises today and when the teacher asked me if I understood the text, for the first time I was able to say that I did. 

Some of those things I learned are:

Minä olen amerikkalainen ja olen kotoisin Indianapolisista, USAsta. Minä opiskellen sairaanhoitoa ja minä puhun englantia, espanjaa, ja vähän suomea. :) 

I have to admit though, this feeling only came today. This week has been rough, and to be honest, culture shock has begun to set in. I realized that I miss hearing English and even Spanish, that I missed America and just American things haha. Also the realization that I have to start studying for NCLEX and my KU application is due in a week really started to stress me out. I've had to get up earlier and earlier each day this week, 6am and then walk 30 minutes to the school. I know that's really not that early, but I can't seem to get to bed before midnight! 

Tomorrow is my last day at the elementary school. But for now, I'm up to my neck in Finnish books  :)