I lived in Finland for three years; not a chance of absorbing even the most basic things. I can mumble a handful of words and that's about it. Most of those words are in the article.
I'm Dutch. I learned English in school. And some basic French and German. And a bit of Latin. My French was actually getting decent by the time I quit studying it. Good enough to read some simple books. But I've forgotten most of it. I moved to Sweden in 1998 and lived there for 2 years and picked up a basic understanding of the language. Easy; lots in common with German, English, and Dutch. And the grammar is very simple and regular. I can still pick apart written Swedish/Danish/Norwegian pretty easily (they share the same grammar and a lot of vocabulary).
When I moved to Finland where Swedish is an official language, I used that for official things like taxes. It's otherwise completely useless in daily life as no Finnish speaking Finn will bother speaking Swedish and there are only a 10% or so Swedish speaking ones who all speak decent Finnish. In fact I took my Swedish beginners class in Sweden with a few Finnish exchange students. They all had to learn it in school but clearly not to the point where they were any good at it. Mind you, this was a class for beginners with essentially no Swedish skills whatsoever.
Getting by with English is easy in Finland. Essentially everyone speaks it and so few foreigners are able to master Finnish that it's just easier for everyone to stick to English for the locals rather than patiently waiting for the foreigners to string a few words together. They'll just roll their eyes and switch to English at the first hint of you being foreign.
In other countries, you actually get a lot of shit for not mastering the local language. Not a thing in Finland. I live in Germany where that very much is a thing.
Germany is my fourth country and my German sucks; so I get plenty of shit from the locals. I get by with my high school German, very bad grammar, and ability to map enough of it back to Dutch/English that I can work my way through an email or document. My spoken German is extremely limited. I lack the vocabulary, grammar, etc. I'm OK with that. I've accepted that I'm not magically going to be turning into a person that is good at or enjoys studying a language for thousands of hours on end. Which is roughly what it takes. I actually have a busy job. I don't have the spare time. And what little I have, I need for resting and doing enjoyable things.
We have the power of AI these days. It's easier than ever to interact with people around the world. We're not that far off from a usable babel fish type universal translator solution being practical enough that you can just travel to outer Waziristan and strike up a conversation with a local sheep herder. It's getting there for written text. But real time verbal exchanges are still challenging. Kind of looking forward to that getting fixed.
Well.. with AI, or whatever good statistical translation tool you use, it's possible to have a one-to-one conversation, kind of. A Japanese friend (not young, speaks only Japanese) stayed for quite a while in northern Europe and communicated with their host via a hand-held translator. It worked out well enough, they're still in contact long after.
But you can't be part of a group of more than two people and do that. You can't inject your opinion about something in real time when the chatter is going on. You can't even get a translation in your ear about what people are saying, as while you're waiting for the translator to start translating (with Japanese the verb, and thus the action, comes last..) the next person is already talking.
There'll never be a Star Trek universal translator. And today's AI doesn't understand context enough to handle pronouns and gender when translating between languages which don't have them, or handles them differently.
You probably already have the babel fish in your pocket, most modern Samsung phones now will do a very acceptable real-time english-german translation - both in-person and during a call.
I'm aware; I have a Google Pixel phone. Real-time translations are still fairly useless for business meetings. I've also been experimenting with various AI transcription tools in online meetings, live subtitles, etc. They all suffer from the same problem: you need a lot of context to translate spoken language and that context is simply not there in a fragments of a conversation. It's in the category of better than nothing. But when you need to respond to somebody it's very distracting to be dealing with bad translations.
You get mis-understood and weirdly translated names, acronyms, jargon, etc. And that's on top of people with bad accents, microphones, etc. It's getting better but right now it's more of a LOL whut?! than that it's actually useful.
But it's clearly on a path to crossing into useful and from there to indispensable territory. Hopefully soon. Because I need this stuff in a hurry.
I'm Dutch. I learned English in school. And some basic French and German. And a bit of Latin. My French was actually getting decent by the time I quit studying it. Good enough to read some simple books. But I've forgotten most of it. I moved to Sweden in 1998 and lived there for 2 years and picked up a basic understanding of the language. Easy; lots in common with German, English, and Dutch. And the grammar is very simple and regular. I can still pick apart written Swedish/Danish/Norwegian pretty easily (they share the same grammar and a lot of vocabulary).
When I moved to Finland where Swedish is an official language, I used that for official things like taxes. It's otherwise completely useless in daily life as no Finnish speaking Finn will bother speaking Swedish and there are only a 10% or so Swedish speaking ones who all speak decent Finnish. In fact I took my Swedish beginners class in Sweden with a few Finnish exchange students. They all had to learn it in school but clearly not to the point where they were any good at it. Mind you, this was a class for beginners with essentially no Swedish skills whatsoever.
Getting by with English is easy in Finland. Essentially everyone speaks it and so few foreigners are able to master Finnish that it's just easier for everyone to stick to English for the locals rather than patiently waiting for the foreigners to string a few words together. They'll just roll their eyes and switch to English at the first hint of you being foreign.
In other countries, you actually get a lot of shit for not mastering the local language. Not a thing in Finland. I live in Germany where that very much is a thing.
Germany is my fourth country and my German sucks; so I get plenty of shit from the locals. I get by with my high school German, very bad grammar, and ability to map enough of it back to Dutch/English that I can work my way through an email or document. My spoken German is extremely limited. I lack the vocabulary, grammar, etc. I'm OK with that. I've accepted that I'm not magically going to be turning into a person that is good at or enjoys studying a language for thousands of hours on end. Which is roughly what it takes. I actually have a busy job. I don't have the spare time. And what little I have, I need for resting and doing enjoyable things.
We have the power of AI these days. It's easier than ever to interact with people around the world. We're not that far off from a usable babel fish type universal translator solution being practical enough that you can just travel to outer Waziristan and strike up a conversation with a local sheep herder. It's getting there for written text. But real time verbal exchanges are still challenging. Kind of looking forward to that getting fixed.