I'm neutral, therefore I am?

First things first.

Yesterday I got to go to the airport in Venice. I was only picking up a friend, so technically I didn't even enter the building, but still I was excited to go there. Gots to love the airports.

Also, this time there was a little treat for all the people waiting at the parking lot.

Yes, it's a chicken. Late for flying lessons I suppose.

Anyways, moving on. Today I'd like to talk about languages. As you might know I'm studying German at the moment. It's freakin hard I tell you. I also had to learn Italian superfast before coming here 3 years ago, so at this point I'm starting to feel like a bit of a pro on how to learn stuff, fast. I've made a few observations on how languages work, and if you ask me, there are some corrections to make.

suomi suomi suomiiiiiiiiiii

We Finns have to learn Swedish at school. This is a good and correct thing to do seeing that it's the second official language in Finland, even though some 298 people living near the Russian border think otherwise. We also have to learn English, which is also a good and correct thing to do, seeing that you don't get very far in the world with just Finnish and Swedish.

all you need is love and JVC

The Finnish language has no articles. Nor do we refer to words as masculine or feminine, and there's certainly nothing called "the neutral article". We have other useless things in our language, but no articles what so ever. To make learning new languages a little easier for the little kiddies, we start with English. Another language which has little articles, and no masculine/feminine. The kiddies sing funny songs like "I like coffee, I like tea, Mark likes Tim and so does Steve", and everybody's happy and learning a foreign language like Bob's your uncle and Fanny's your aunt.

Jahå, o så där

Until the time comes to learn Swedish. Things are getting a little bit more complicated when the articles en and ett are introduced, and the little kiddies cry in agony when the teacher says that you also have to conjugate the other words in the sentence accordingly. "But why?" ask the little Finns. The teacher who's nickname is "Vatka" (loosely translated "Stir-it" because of the way her hands used to shake) wasn't able to give an answer but it didn't matter because "YOU'LL DO IT AND THAT'S THAT. AND STOP EATING
                                                         GUM IN MY CLASS".



By now the little Finns are starting to get a little scared, and they think twice about choosing yet another language to study because god knows what kinds of articles they might have to learn next.

je voudrais du vin e service mauvais

Now whether they choose French or Italian the problems are pretty much equal, except that in French you don't pronounce half of the words and instead you get to pronounce things that aren't even there. But the amount of articles and things to conjugate gets higher and higher, and the little Finn just doesn't understand why red isn't simply red ( Simply Red, hehehehe....reach for the stars little Finn), but depending on the noun it's either redO, redA, or redI/redE. To a Finn, red is red, no matter if you're talking about a house or a cat or your cousin's new bike. We all get the                                                         message without adding silly little                                                                            endings to the words, so why bother?

ma che palle...

The poor kiddies who choose German as their third language, well they are in for a real treat. Not only do they have the masculine and the feminine, but also a cool little stupid thing called the neutral article. Now, I understand that being sexually tolerant and not specifying things as manly or womanly is good and correct, but come on could there be something more useless than the neutral article?? Also, you have absolutely no indications as to which words are feminine, which masculine and which neutral, you just have to know it by heart.. Sorry, but WTF? Who's bright idea was this? Oh, oh, and to make things still a little bit more difficult, in order to use accusative or dative, not only do you have different articles for those, but you mix them with the ones you're already using for nominative, only this time the masculine article is used for the feminine dative etc.

jawohl!

The little Finn is thinking that it's a miracle the German people are talking at all. In fact, they sound a little angry when they speak, and that's no miracle at all. I'd be angry too with all these rules.

My question is this: why does masculine and feminine and the articles etc exist? And don't tell me it's because of the Latin origin or something, because they seem just as useless in Latin as they do in German or French or whatever. Why is it necessary to have all these things that almost make you lose interest in learning a new language? Why oh                                                why?

Also Finnish has silly and useless things in it, I'm sure, I just don't know what they are being a native speaker and all. My advice to all the foreigners who are learning Finnish (all 4 of them) is that don't worry about the fine tuning of the language, simply put one word after another in their basic form and we'll get what you're saying. Don't drive yourself insane with the little things, they'll come to you in time.

I have to say though that I do like all the languages that I've had the honor of learning. I'm currently watching movies in German in order to get used to the spoken language, and I think movies dubbed in German sound way better then movies dubbed in Italian. Also, the good thing about knowing a few languages is that by combining what you know of each language you can survive almost anywhere in Europe. I guess we have the "pointless" Latin roots to thank for that.

So fear not little Finn, you can do it!