Phasers on stun

I’ve been feeling unsafe lately. Whenever that happens, I tend to revert to my childhood interests; science fiction, computer games, geeky stuff. I picked up an old science fiction book from my own bookcase and started reading and noticed the date on the cover page: seems I bought this book on 9th February 1989. Whee.

My first foreign language at school was French, but I found English more interesting. One day, at the bookstore in the center of Helsinki, I found a huuuuge bookcase full of English-language science fiction books. I bought one and noticed that I was not able to comprehend most of it – so I set out reading more, sometimes with the dictionary, sometimes just guessing by the context. In a couple of years I had built up a vocabulary good enough to read Star Trek. Admittedly, it was a weird vocabulary: I knew “wormhole effect”, for example, but did not know many normal words.

I’ve always been better at reading and writing foreign languages than speaking them. This is very obvious nowadays. I still can’t really speak Dutch except in everyday situations, shopping and such, but am able to follow lessons and read newspapers. I think most of this difficulty in speaking comes from the Finnish mentality – we tend not to open our mouths before we are certain that we do not make mistakes – and Finnish traditions of language education. I remember endless grammar lessons and written tests, but not much discussion.