I've seen many foreigners quit because they felt like they were intentionally left out of casual conversations, but you really have to understand that speaking in a 2nd or 3rd language for just casual stuff takes a lot of mental effort and if you are already working in a field that requires that effort lowering everyone's productivity to keep you in some nonsense about lawn mowers doesn't make sense.
Finnish is hard just because it's too different from our Indo-European languages mental model.
On the other hand, Finnish is easy to pick up if you are going to study it because the written form is very close to the spoken one (even though spoken it will be more colloquial Finnish). If you learn the phonemes you will know how to pronounce words, easily, train your ears to its core minimal pairs and it will help a lot.
The grammar is logical, there are a few exceptions per case, it's just very different from Indo-European languages.
I agree that it's very obscure but I take that for Swedish with the silver lining that learning an obscure language will be, in the worst case, a good party trick.
It takes years to become conversational in a language with dedicated practice -- that's an immense amount of effort to put into a party trick for a person with a full time job and other responsibilities.
It's my own personal silver lining because I value having a surprising obscure detail about my personality to show to people. It's a thing I enjoy doing, just for the sake of fun, taking someone completely by surprise in a nice way, e.g.: I went to visit Brazil only once since I moved from there, during this trip I met a Swede who lived in Brazil for 20+ years, who runs a Swedish-Brazilian restaurant quite far from major cities and surprising him with a conversation in Swedish was a very cool experience, both for him and I.
I create a personal justification to why learning Swedish could be interesting beyond using it in the country, even more when I moved and had no idea if I was staying here for long, why would I bother to learn it if I didn't find other motivations to interest me?
Learning languages is really interesting, it even helps to restructure your thoughts. People find different drives to do things, that's mine.
And I have a job and other responsibilities.
On the whole, no one should expect to have easy conversations in 60 days, regardless of language. These are always exceptions, and are most often small talk instead of including a wide variety of subjects: Simply talking about your own interests in any depth takes some dedication, but hearing about other's interests takes more.
Years isn't on the high end: I took classes. 15-18 hours a week, with a transition to speaking practice in a nursing home (while performing some basic CNA-type work). 2 years of classes. For me, this landed me technically intermediate, but it still didn't take much to get out of my depth of knowledge. This is a pretty normal course. Some folks are faster, sure: But some are slower.
Correct - I guarantee you can generate a lot of goodwill (and possibly free drinks) from drunken Finns on the Helsinki-Stockholm booze ferries.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: we've had to ask you many times not to break the site guidelines. You've continued to make a habit of breaking them. I don't want to have to ban you so would you please fix this?
I'm not going to take my time to cover all of your points, I'm not using academic terms and yes, making up my own terms to put down what it's been my experience. Indo-European languages share a lot of structure and roots, similar ways of thinking even if phrasal structure are very different between Germanic and Latin languages, the same for Slavic ones.
I choose to do with my own time whatever I prefer, card tricks have been part of it, yoyo tricks in my childhood/teens, and so on. I'm not wasting years learning Swedish because I live in this country and I'm becoming a citizen, it's been a fun endeavour that I started with the mindset that in the worst case it'd be a party trick.
This is my experience, instead of being an ass, try to improve on top of it, you help nobody.
Now please, try to behave as is expected by the rules of this forum, I try to come here to have civil conversations and not expecting this place to devolve into some other cesspool subreddit.
Cheers.
Greek is also very synthetic, so a little basic vocabulary goes a long way. I like the word for "waterproofing", literally "against-through-rain-making" (αδιαβροχοποίηση, a-dia-brocho-poiesi)
In fact a Finnish friend of my dad's learnt Tamil via remote from one of our poets .. to get proficient enough to translate some ancient poetry into Finnish!
But from practical point of view, these languages share common features like: vowel harmony, phonetic writing, suffixal affixation, grammatical cases. These skills transfer easily over to the next language, once you learn them with one language.
(Not all languages mentioned share all the features.)
It's true that there is practically no common vocabulary between the tree though. (Hungarian and Turkish share some small amount of words due to relatively recent Ottoman rule, but that's about it)
An Italian friend learning Turkish complained mainly about having to wait until the end of sentence (The Turkish (and Japanese) sentences are canonically Subject-Object-Verb) to understand what's going on. And imagine a native English speaker's frustration when they realize groups of words can come in any order in Latin (and Turkish, and Finnish) and it's the suffixes that make up a word's function in the sentence!
So, my point was that being exposed to a language with a different grammar is simply good mental exercise and will come in handy when learning other, seemingly separate foreign languages, regardless of the amount of people who speak it.
Yes, there are grammatical similarities, no that won't help you much at all in understanding or talking to people...
And here are some examples:
Hung. kéz (hand) = Finn. käsi, Hung. vér (blood) = Finn. veri, Hung. méz (honey) = Finn. mesi, Hung. szarv (horn) = Finn. sarvi, Hung. vaj (butter) = Finn. voi, Hung. eleven (alive) = Finn. elävä, Hung. menni (to go) = Finn. mennä, Hung. reped (to be torn) = Finn. repeää.
Then you have switches from h to k, as in Hung. hal (fish) = Finn. kala
Then you have switches from f to p, as in fej (head) = Finn. pää, Hung. fészek (nest) = Finn. pesä
Or, the letter n in Finnish is often replaced by ny in Hungarian, as in Finn. niellä (swallow) = Hung. nyelni, Finn. miniä (daughter-in-law) = Hung. meny
Hungarian and Finnish diverged 4500 years ago, and they represent the opposite spectrum of the Ugro-Finn language group. There are 9 languages in the same language group, and the middle parts of it have more in common with both languages than Hungarian with Finnish.
> Finnish is hard just because it's too different from our Indo-European languages mental model.
I'd imagine having this experience sure helps. Lots of people struggle to give up relying on mental translations to/from thoughts in their first languages.
Spoken and written/theoretical Finnish are quite different. In practice you choose from a small subset of possible suffix combinations and this choice is informed by a lot more than you would first think based on how the theory is presented.
It's not a difficult language, at all. It is actually surprisingly simple. The problem is the obscurity - there is very little interest in Finnish as a second language, and the teaching community for it is small and hasn't developed the kind of resources that imperial languages that were taught to countless millions of people during the age of empires (English, Spanish, French) have available. There's just not been a long enough history of teaching Finnish to adults and the resources are poor. My recommendations if you want to learn it:
a) constant low-level exposure to local media - local television has foreign-language films in original language with subtitles - this is super useful as a way to pick up new vocabulary you don't encounter in your everyday life, such as "get to the chopper" :P
b) this is controversial but I think the standard language model used by linguists is too strongly inspired by Latin and a very poor fit for Finnish. I find trying to learn grammar formally is counterproductive and will set you back. Instead, think of the noun suffixes as a preposition equivalent. Trying to think of them as cases will mess with your progress
c) hang around people having conversations and listen. Don't try to understand, just get comfortable with the sound of it. One of the more difficult things with agglutinative languages (languages that stick things together, very roughly speaking) is parsing out bits of words. Early on I'd sit on buses a lot and eavesdrop on random conversations just to get comfortable with the language.
d) Language courses are a poor path to fluency. I know people who spent a decade and a half on language courses and were unable to effectively communicate. If you are in a language course, try to counter its effects by at least equivalent-time exposure to random conversation
e) Music is a great in - it's way easier to remember complete phrases as song lyrics than standalone, and you can listen to an album a few times and then try dissecting a particular song's lyrics to figure out what it's all about.
f) Your primary bottleneck as a beginner is vocabulary - ignore grammar at first, just collect as much vocab as possible. The grammar is so simple and structurally regular that you'll pick up most of it from context, but that only works if you know what the hell people are talking about. Collect words everywhere you can. Read comics, read newspapers. Read medication warning labels. Read user manuals. The latter two are especially useful because they're parallel text so you have the translations right there. Don't try to keep score of how many words you know, keep score on how many word roots you recognize on an average day.
g) Try transcribing things you hear. youtube-dl a news broadcast, play it at 0.75x speed and write it all down, pausing the video if necessary. Don't bother trying to comprehend everything, just write it all down.
h) Use Finnish in boring everyday stuff - supermarket checkout, for example. This is easy low-level stuff and you'll get functional at that level very quickly. Do this way before you feel comfortable. This will give you daily active low-level practice. Use Finnish for all interactions where it doesn't have severe consequences if you're misunderstood.
i) Use media targeted at children. Story books are a great way to get lots of simple vocab in, and also a bit of culture. Go to the library, pick up a bunch of books targeted at 6-12 year olds, read them all. Repeat.
j) It may appear superficially that all the vocabulary is weird and foreign but a whole lot of it is borrowed, just borrowed a long way back. Not so useful early on but you pick up some patterns eventually. A number of phrases are word for word translations from other languages - for example "elintarvike" (food products, groceries) is a word for word translation of German "Lebensmittel". Learning German after Finnish I found a lot of familiar phrases. Going further back, you see a ton of germanic roots in everyday words like "tuoli" (chair). It's not obvious at first until you look at the Estonian version "tool", which is an earlier form of the same word. That is of course an abbreviated version of "stool"/"Stuhl" which is clearly germanic. Again, this won't help you learn new vocabulary but it may help with the feeling of "what the fuck how do they come up with this shit" that you get on first exposure to a new language group.
Expect 18-20 months before you can make sense of most things your colleagues say. Going from there to fluent communication depends entirely on how much you actively use it. It's not hard, it's just that nobody has had a century or two of experience teaching it to adults, so you have to figure out ways of making it work for you. Have faith in yourself. Once you break through the initial "this is so weird" barrier, progress is quick and very rewarding.
There is also nowadays Yle's Selkouutiset (Simple Finnish news). It's a short daily news bulletin of most important headlines read really patiently and while avoiding using any difficult words (i.e. only basic vocabulary. If complex vocabulary is needed the newscaster actually stops to explain what that word means in simpler terms.)
As a native speaker it hurts my head to listen to it for some reason when it comes on the radio. But I've heard from many Finnish as second language leaners that they find this public service resource really useful.
> b) this is controversial but I think the standard language model used by linguists is too strongly inspired by Latin and a very poor fit for Finnish. I find trying to learn grammar formally is counterproductive and will set you back. Instead, think of the noun suffixes as a preposition equivalent. Trying to think of them as cases will mess with your progress
Interesting point. This is what a lot of people learning the language tend to get overtly confused with. Perhaps your point isn't as controversial as one would think...
> j) It may appear superficially that all the vocabulary is weird and foreign but a whole lot of it is borrowed, just borrowed a long way back. Not so useful early on but you pick up some patterns eventually. A number of phrases are word for word translations from other languages - for example "elintarvike" (food products, groceries) is a word for word translation of German "Lebensmittel". Learning German after Finnish I found a lot of familiar phrases. Going further back, you see a ton of germanic roots in everyday words like "tuoli" (chair). It's not obvious at first until you look at the Estonian version "tool", which is an earlier form of the same word. That is of course an abbreviated version of "stool"/"Stuhl" which is clearly germanic. Again, this won't help you learn new vocabulary but it may help with the feeling of "what the fuck how do they come up with this shit" that you get on first exposure to a new language group.
hehe, yeah that's the second difficult part of the equation. Trouble is that we also borrow a lot from Swedish (which isn't too far from German, but still) and also Russian.
But you're right in that the word formations themselves are pretty logical (maybe this is a Germanic thing?) - for example, computer [tietokone] is literally "information machine", airplane [lentokone] is "flying machine", and my favourite example is the old word for television [näköradio] which is literally "vision radio."
As in machine learning, just throwing a bunch of training data at my brain (in the form of complete, native sentences) way outperforms building a rule-based system to the point where I just don't bother learning any rules at all.
We do that as programmers as well: we get familiar with a syntax/grammar just enough so that we could get to reading source code, learning idioms to do things such as open a file, or make a request, or use a regex. The quick tutorial + cookbook works very well in programming.
This is one reason I lean towards Stephen Krashen's work on language acquisition, and his "input hypothesis"[0].
The way I learned every language was by consuming content that increased in complexity and variety. Patterns were acquired.
It'll be very stressful for a few months, but, in my experience, will get you conversing in about half a year.
This is not a language that shares any traits with English. It is hard to get going, and the vocabulary takes a considerable amount of time.
You can't switch to Finnish at work, as you simply would not be able to get by, and you can't do it at home as it changes the dynamics of your relationship. This is not an excuse, it's reality.
That's what I was trying to say. If you do want to learn the local language, you have to be willing and able to put up with it being pretty crappy for a few months. My experience has been that it's very hard to integrate a new language into your persona without immersing yourself in it. For most people it's not worth it if they can get by without. Completely understandable.
Now you've got me wondering if I should start thinking about how to teach Finnish to English-speaking professionals :D
Finish kids don’t need ten years to learn the language either, do they?
So I think in this context of a professional—who likely has a family—coming over to work, deanclatworthy is right.
Expats are most likely are in an English-speaking environment at work, where speaking Finnish at the level of a four-year-old is going to be a bit of a hindrance; no practice at home unless they have a Finnish partner, and no real options for social activities that will tolerate the learning curve, like children have.
And if it is anything like the Netherlands, any mistake you make will instantly and irreversibly switch the conversation back to English.
Children learn the local language, partly because of immersion, but also because they're corrected nearly constantly when they begin to speak. We forget that when they're capable of "good" communication.
I'm seeing interesting things here, I speak to the child exclusively in English and as far as he's concerned I speak/understand zero Finnish. I'm hoping I can start speaking more Finnish in the near future, he should be able to understand I'm "mostly English".
One obvious thing that really drives the language home is the notion of pronouns. Finnish has no gendered ones, so when he speaks English to me he'll be "Mummy is asleep, he will wake up soon?". I have to keep saying "Mummy is a girl, we say she". I've been doing that for 8+ months, and he still doesn't get it right. That's the level of repetition that's involved in learning a new language.. and even now it hasn't "stuck".
If you want to learn Finnish, go for it. Just don't expect it to be easy. :)
Living in a neighboring country I understand nothing of Finnish. Spanish, Italian, French — I can make some sense out of it without knowing the languages.
I must however add that I've witnessed, more than a handful of times, English speaking knowledge workers moving to Sweden who continue speaking English and only English for years and years.
It comes with a social price though. You will never quite understand all the social codes or become a part of the social fabric. At many parties and dinners I've seen the whole group having to switch to English because there's someone in the group who has lived here for five or ten years and still haven't gotten around even attempting to speak Swedish. Everyone will switch but but it will be a different night, without all the nuances we usually enjoy. In the end everyone loses.
If you plan to stay, do everything to learn the language. You will be happier person in your new country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Permic_languages#/media/...
There is no shortcut to learning a new language - even if you're fluent in 9 languages, the 10th will still take 1000+ hours. The most efficient way appears to be a loop of listening and drilling vocabulary, particularly listening to excerpts that come with text transcription.
I always make most progress when I’m forced to use the language when I’m in the country.
I’m surprised OP isn’t fluent with the language after 10 years in the country.
One uncle has been living in France for over 40 years, but anyone can still hear he’s a foreigner, most Dutch will immediately recognize his accent as Dutch, and many can immediately pinpoint the region he grew up in. (Part of the reason is probably: he himself doesn’t care. He just talks —sometimes with hands and feet— and his interlocutors manage to pick up enough of what he says to suit him.)
An aunt used to live in Brazil for years, and never could get the hang of Brazilian Portuguese. Her son has been living in Brazil for some 15 year now, and is still not fluent in the language...
People's ability to pick up languages can be totally unrelated to their general intelligence.
That said, I _personally_ agree that immersion is the best way of learning a new language. But it still does take time, and you've got to have the opportunity.
Of course you need to learn the language of the nation that hosts you. You are an immigrant.
I'm not sure the "even" is actually appropriate here. Both Swedish and French (along with probably every other Western European Indo-European language) are among the easiest for English speakers to learn. Swedish also has a disproportionate amount of resources online due in part to immigration patterns, as I understand it.
You move to a country, you learn the language. If you don't, that's your fault and you have have to deal with it.
This is pretty much true, many people do. You can get your paperwork sorted, buy a car, a bank account, deal with the government and have a social life all in English. I have done.
But, all of the comments I'm seeing here are saying that while this is true, if you want to take the step forward into learning Finnish, it _is_ harder than other languages and that the resources around doing so as an adult are not as developed as in other languages. The fact that you don't strictly need to and that a lot of people have excellent English here anyway makes it harder, therefore active and sustained effort is needed on your part, you are not going to 'just pick it up'. If I had lived in France for as long as I have in Finland (not even a full year), then there is no question that my French would be at a much higher level than my Finnish is now.
Imo, that's just an excuse. I live in a country that has fantastic English speakers, don't even plan on staying here longer than 3 years and still took the time to learn the language (probably B2-B1 after 2 years). Sure, it's understandable that not everybody wants to do that, but it should be obvious to any foreigner that you lock yourself out of a multitude of jobs by not learning the language.
The only reason I'm saying this is because the top comment listed learning the native language as a negative, which imo it really isn't.
> If I had lived in France for as long as I have in Finland (not even a full year), then there is no question that my French would be at a much higher level than my Finnish is now.
That may be true for you, but definitely not for others. There are foreigners living in France that can barely count in the language. I've seen and heard that first hand. Some extreme example have been in the country a decade. It really depends on where you move to, where you work, who you surround yourself with, and how motivated you are.
In the US I (as a non-native speaker) was very pleasantly surprised that accents do not matter and mistakes that do not kill the meaning are universally tolerated. People would still gladly chat with you over beer, etc.
But that is not the case in some other countries: optional conversations suffer a lot if you, say miss a few conjugations.
Where do Finns stand on this?
Have seen it many times.
English seems common in the groups of immigrants you come across too. I know people who've moved from France, etc, and there are lots of immigrants from various countries - many of whom speak their own language, and English as the second. Some go on to learn Finnish to a greater or lesser extent.
I've ordered food in restaurants, cider/whisky in pubs, etc, and had the server just reply back in English.
Me: "saisinko omena cidre?" Them: "Do you want ice?"
On the one hand it is helpful at times, but on the other hand it is deeply frustrating. 90% of the staff at the local newsagents has pulled me aside on a quiet morning and asked "Do you prefer English or Finnish?" I say "Finnish", but to be honest the conversations I have with the shop-staff are mostly them reading the total, and asking "would you like a receipt/bag/anything else?" so it doesn't help me in any real sense, but it's nice they offer/ask.
And yes, younger people know English well and will usually switch to English if you're struggling - unless they think that their English is too bad (which it usually isn't).
Alcohol is very expensive though!
I've seen a lot of whining about the high taxes here, but honestly this is not a European way of thinking. You are safe here. You have a safety net if things don't go right in your work or health.
Taxes are also super simple. You tell the tax office your predicted income, you get a percentage and give it to your employer. You don't have any other dealings with them unless you need to adjust it due to change in income, or you have some expenses to lower your tax percentage before the end of the tax year. It's highly efficient and works well.
I would happily pay 3-5x the taxes for a similar salary to emigrate, but if you offer me 1/10 the pay? That's tough. It makes me feel like there isn't a big market for my services across the pond.
It's a shame, because I love tech and I lean heavily left. But this has been the case for at least the past decade, and it shows no sign of stopping.
>Amazon/Google/etc happily pay ten times that salary
In the thread, they say Helsinki juniors start out at ~$3k/mo after taxes. In the Bay Area, let's say you are a junior at a FAANG and are getting $150k/year. This works out to $8k/mo after taxes. So the difference between a FAANG and Helsinki is more like 3x. Maybe, 4X if you account for bonuses/options. But it's not 10x.
Obviously, 3-4X is still a lot. If it's a choice between Helsinki and SF, SF wins hands down.
Problem is that most of the engineers working in the US are not working for a FAANG company in the Bay Area. If you look at what engineers are getting paid in places like Houston or Atlanta, you will find that juniors start at $60k/year, which is $4k/mo after taxes. That's very close to the reported $3k/mo rate for Helsinki.
There is this weird trend I noticed on HN. Whenever the subject of money comes up, people start casually quoting Bay Area numbers like they are representative of the industry as a whole. I don't think they are.
That junior earning $150k/yr total comp is closer to $300k in a few short years.
At that point you're getting awfully close to the OP's 10x claim (Before taxes) but of course you don't subsidized healthcare, a useable pension, decent government services, clean/safe streets, etc...
After living in the Bay Area for a decade, I would pick Helsinki over any city in the Bay. Fool me once shame on me... fool me twice, well you can't fool me again :-)
Juniors don't start at $3k/mo after taxes, it's more like $2.5k. On top of that, there's ~20% VAT vs. ~5-10% sales tax in US. On top of that, the price level in Finland is notably higher (25% pricier according to PPP conversion factor). Also, practically nobody gets stocks or options here, and any kind of bonus pay is usually insignificant. There are much fewer options to live frugally. Majority of the sectors of the economy are dominated by monopolies, duopolies and silent cartels.
As a silly example illustrating the fact - a junior software engineer in Finland can purchase 0.52 Tesla Model 3s per year for his take home pay. The same engineer in Bay Area could buy 3, maybe 4 with stocks.
Americans (and capitalist supporters -usually people without a real capital-) are fixated with raw amounts of money. It's very different from European culture, where we usually consider many other factors as quality of life first.
Also they tend to consider us as poor. I've been told several times in conversations "nobody can afford iPhones in Europe" and other nonsense like that. Hey at least I never had to worry about getting medical treatment. I can perfectly afford a stupid iPhone if I want but there are much more important factors in life than "how many gadget can you afford to buy?"
However, actually a junior would make something like ~3k€ before taxes in Helsinki, not after taxes. The taxes are (very) progressive, at that income level it's something like 27% in Finland.
In addition to the relatively small salaries, the cost of living is pretty high in the capital area. If you do move to some of the smaller cities your price-to-value ratio for living will go up way faster than trying to reach the same ratio by instead hunting for a larger salary around Helsinki.
But even then there's the purchasing power which is also relatively low everywhere. It depends on what you spend your money on, of course, but generally unless all you buy is telecommunication services everything feels pretty expensive. Moreover, the price difference to nearby countries and to the rest of the Europe is often so much higher that even if I'd very much like to support local Finnish business often there's just no way I'm going to justify that to my wallet.
While the cost of car ownership and general cost of living is high, I'd like to point out that you don't necessarily need a car if you live and work in Helsinki. Or at least you don't need two cars in the household.
A bicycle is a perfectly viable option for transport for about 8 months of the year, or at least 6 if you're afraid of the weather (or can't change clothes at work). The bike paths are excellent and safe and if your route involves going through the city center, it's by far the fastest mode of transport (you can average 20km/h easily, can't match this by car or bus in the city). Bicycling may not be quite as good as continental Europe, but it's pretty good and the city is small enough to go everywhere by bike.
The rest of the year can be covered by public transport, which is very reliable.
Unfortunately COVID has hit the public transport in many levels, but hopefully that situation will get better. On the other hand, it did bring grocery delivery everywhere so that negates another need for a car.
Once you get a family or buy a house, owning a car is basically a must. And the price tag for it in Finland is very high. 1000e a year just for mandatory car tax, mandatory yearly checkup and liability insurance. ~70% of the price of gas is taxes. Cars themselves are so expensive that Finland has one of the oldest car fleet in the developed world (12.2 years).
I see plenty of parents with small kids in public transport, those that are using strollers don't even need a ticket. I even remember one co-worker telling that when he moved to Helsinki, he tried using car once to bring his kids to school & coming to work after. He switched to metro after that one attempt and said it made things much easier.
Furniture, materials etc. are not usually things you are transporting daily (or even monthly). Personally when I needed those, I just either paid for home delivery or rented car for few hours.
I won't claim that there are no need for car (e.g. there are some routes that take a longer with public transport compared to your own car & there are ares which don't have many connections available), but it's not as critical as some people might think.
Most people in Helsinki live in apartments so construction etc is not an issue. If you can afford a house in Helsinki, car ownership is not a significant chunk of your budget.
And I have plenty of friends who do have a car for kids etc, but only one car per household. Which is not viable in many places in the world or even elsewhere in southern Finland.
Cars in Finland have not only a value-added tax (VAT) of 24% but also a separate car tax slapped on them. At the extreme cases this can result in over 100% additional tax to be paid on top of the retail price of a car.
One car household is still much more common than two cars per family.
I don’t have an angle other than “compare salaries against CoL, rather than looking at salaries alone.” I find it very interesting how the automatic assumption is that I’m arguing for or against Finland here in some sort of proxy left vs. right fight.
Edit: Also by https://www.amazon.jobs/en/location/helsinki-finland it seems that Amazon is not hiring in Helsinki. (If you actually are, maybe you should update the page?)
Obviously there aren't many of these jobs but I'd point to gaming companies like Supercell and Seriously.
But I really dislike rat-races, so I tend to avoid areas with loads of competition. The US tech market is like a bottomless money pool, and it's hard to justify putting a lot of effort into moving somewhere that would tie you to a few well-paying employers.
I like working on and learning about things that benefit the people around me! But I also like relaxing and not starving. C'est la vie: it's not perfect.
6k€/month is $86k a year. Ten times that is $860k a year, almost 1 million a year. How many years do you need to work to get to that level of salary?
Are you calculating the cost of living?
I'm not an aristocrat and I oscillate between working hard and going off into nature for random periods of time, so I'd sure like to live somewhere with a stable safety net. But for now, the US seems cheaper even with its ridiculous baseline CoL expenses. I can buy vehicles on a whim and mess with them and bum around for years on 5-10hr/week gigs even after $Nk monthly expenses, which would be difficult in the EU. And if you can pay the exorbitant health insurance rates, the medical care is actually quite good.
I do feel bad sometimes, but it's not exactly easy to change your citizenship, and the whole political situation sure isn't my fault.
Now all kind of exceptions will come out the wood works telling me how they are "easily" making 10k/mo by doing something and working for someone who they won't admit. Yes even I know someone who is (or at least was) making 10k/mo, but he was very specialized expert, actual 10x developer. Most people are making far less. 3k/mo seems like the most common salary (again before taxes) for generic tech job.
If you are in a "high scaling" tech company expect the salaries to be higher as Helsinki basically competes with places like Stockholm, Amsterdam, Berlin, etc in salaries for the skilled people to build that stuff. Still no Silicon Valley but really good if you factor in the cost of living/"free" services.
Another thing to add to the salary is that you are truly expected to only work 7.5h per day (8h minus a 30min lunch break). If you work more you will get paid for those hours. So if in SV in reality you end up working 60h work weeks you should be paid roughly 50% more when compared to the 37.5h work week here just from the hours alone. If you work on weekends then even more as those get extra multipliers in Finland.
Also things like being on the 24/7 on call rotation that I see as being advertised as "part of the job" in a lot of job adverts are actually paid time here. So basically you end being paid for the hours outside normal work hours at 50% of your salary converted to hourly salary.
As a beginning developer I made the equivalent of ~3k euro/month in Canada and worked my way up to 5k in 3 years.
With a bit of experience and luck one can then move to the US to make ~15k euro/month and pay 30% lower tax rate, at the expense of basically all functioning public institutions :)
I also know of a few developers making 10k€ / month but I have to say they're very rare to come across in this country.
With 6k salary, you would likely be taking home at most 4k. 6k translates to about 75000 yearly (lomaraha, i.e. holiday bonus, is about 50% of single month's pay). With standard deductions, your tax rate would be around 29% (that's with 19% municipal tax, it varies a bit depending where you live) & you need to add 8.40% to that for retirement & unemployment (those are required). 6000*(1-0.3745)=3753. Additional 156 if you add 1/12 of lomaraha to that.
Some additional deductions can bring the value up a bit (transport, home office etc.).
If you're a single software engineer, don't come to Helsinki. Go to SV or somewhere where they pay you mid six figures to work your ass off 16 hours a day.
But if you're either too old to find that exciting or have children, Finland is a great place to live. Just the subsidised child care itself will make it worth it. No "college funds" either.
Even the unicorn startups don’t always work you to the bone. Honestly, I see it more like many people who /want/ to do that end up in that position because they want that stuff. It makes them feel like they’re doing something with their life (usually because they have an empty life outside of work).
I mean, think about the effort it takes to get into some of these companies. You don’t do it because you’re just a regular person who wants a well paying job. You’re career oriented - your career dictates your life satisfaction. That’s why you’ll work yourself to the bone - because it’s what you wanna do. This area attracts that mentality massively.
If you're comparing 3k EUR takehome to a mid-level engineer in the bay area which is probably 15k USD (rolling in bonus + stock), that's 144k USD more per year take home.
Even for 2 kids at $24k per year ($48k total), you can cover childcare and have another ~$100k USD left over.
Compared to what, a few thousand a month PER CHILD in the US?
Also birth and all pre-natal care etc. is practically free (tens of euros per visit max).
Great startup/tech scene, close to nature, Finns are fun to hang out with.
Best experienced during the summer, but the 90 day relocation "trial" with everything organised sounds pretty good now too.
For the price of a 1 bedroom flat in Helsinki you can get a hectare of land and a 100m2+ house a bit further up north. You'll still be practically next to Helsinki by American standards =)
You can get an apartment in the (actual) city center around 50m^2 for 900-1000 of that, food expenses I'd guess are around 500 (never tracked it) and that leaves you with 1500 to enjoy on life each month.
I purchased my place after about 5 years which is 5mins by subway to the center, and I pay around the same for my mortgage as I did on rent, except I am investing in equity now. I'm also set to make a large profit when I sell this place. I'm very happy with my entry into the property market here. It's completely infeasible to do this in cities like London or any major metropolitan area in the US.
Take home pay in the US is college money, rainy day money, retirement money... Can't really compare take home pay in a welfare state with US take home pay. It's just not possible.
Now: if you plan to retire in the US, obviously your equation would be slightly different. Paying for an education in the US, then moving to a place where salaries are set assuming people get good pensions and free education, then moving back to the US where you again need retirement money - that's the tricky equation.
[1] https://www.etk.fi/en/finnish-pension-system/pension-securit...
Calculator https://www.tyoelake.fi/sv/pensionsraknaren/
So far I am not sure how easy it is to get to 4K/mo.
But my point was more about you mentioning retirement savings only for US workers. While median income earners will get very similar government pensions in both countries.
Similarly if you move there from a country with lower taxes/pensions such as the US you’d probably bring savings to compensate that you missed a number of years.
After all, these pensions based on number of years worked is often just a form of mandated savings from employers payroll taxes.
If this 4K/mo is easily achievable only if you have another pension from a more generous country, then it is not proving your point much.
My first year in Finland, i got SAD - seasonal affective disorder - and it was horrible. No amount of money or learning Finnish can address that. Oh and there's yet another downside to an ethnically homogenous society like Finland - you'll never be more than a tolerated person if you are a visible minority. Someone who's visibly different will never be a fully equal member of society.
Personally, this is why i much prefer life in the US or Canada despite all their downsides.
I'm surprised about the second point though. Outside Helsinki, sure - but in HKI I've met enough non-white people who grew up there, speak Finnish and didn't feel like that at all. I felt like the language is more important for being considered a „proper Finn”.
https://suomenkuvalehti.fi/jutut/kotimaa/sk-tutki-suomalaise...
See this page also - https://multiculturalmeanderings.com/tag/nordic-countries/
In particular,
>The 2020 OECD report about Finland criticizes that their education is unevenly distributed. In an interview with the HPR, Michaela Moua, a senior officer at the Office of the Non-Discrimination Ombudsman in Finland, recognizes racially motivated guidance in schools, especially in the Finnish as Second Language studies: “Black and Brown students are often advised to take these classes even if Finnish is their first language.”
>She adds that “this shows how it is still widely thought that one cannot be a person of color and Finnish at the same time.”
At the heart of the problem is that Finnish identity overlaps significantly with Finnish ethnicity. So yes, i think your anecdotes are the exception, not the norm.
Months long waiting times for a dentist? I'm not sure if that qualify their public healthcare as great. In a months time your dental issue might actually become acute.
A good rule of thumb is to have a CT scan every year for early detection. I have been doing it for the last 5 years and boy it did save me from lots of pain. Lots of cavities are hiding unseen and with no pain.
Brush your teeth, visit your dentist. Yes some might do an x-ray for hard to see areas. But this is not rocket science
Actually, in some places you have to pay a premium for your insurance/social security if you don't visit the dentist at least twice a year.
These control visits qualify as non-acute, and they greatly reduce the amount of acute dental issues you might have.
Granted, this is another Finnish city, not Helsinki.
Months? What? Why? We have universal health care but the dentist is just days away... if you have pain, usually 1-2 day, or immediate extraction. I live in Eastern Europe.
Most employers offer private healthcare and even if you buy the insurance yourself its inexpensive. I also disagree that difficult cases aren't dealt with properly on the public side, in my experience it's been the opposite: simple cases are ignored, but serious ones are taken care of properly.
There's plenty of English language daycares and plenty of non IT jobs for non-Finnish speakers in both smaller companies and medium sized ones as well. IT consultancies are a different story.
Winter is no worse than in mainland Europe or Britain and if you go a bit inland, you see a lot more snow.
If you use a big bank like Nordea then you get great English service, at least in my experience, same goes for other services.
I grew up in Finland and wanted desperately to get away when I finished high school, but having lived in the UK, Germany and Russia and spent some time in the US, my views have changed.
An aside, if anyone reading this is interested in relocating here as a developer, we at Toughbyte can help. Here's a blog post we wrote on the topic:
https://www.toughbyte.com/blog/relocating-to-finland-as-a-de...
Finally all our open positions in Helsinki can be found here:
https://www.toughbyte.com/positions?location=Helsinki%2C+Fin...
"Hello, thank you, goodbye, yes, no, sorry, I don't speak Finnish, English?" is probably ok for everyday life, if you don't care about not fitting in. And even that might not be necessary, most of the time you know what might be asked. E.g. if your getting groceries then pretty much every answer is going to be no from you. Just a head sign and a smile will work fine. Or just go to the self-checkout.
For administrative stuff, Google Trad (or similar) is often good enough. Especially nowadays where most things are online. For critical stuff (hospital, ...), they'll find someone that speaks English.
Funnily enough, it's the stuff like getting an haircut, going to the garage and other non-critical but non-automated/common tasks which are the most difficult. You start to dread those situations because you cannot make by with just smiles and yes/no.
If you need immediate service, you get to a fast track queue and can get free dentist care on the same day. If it's non-acute, you can go to a private clinic which is highly subsidized but does costs some money. But nothing like in the US.
> And is the wait similar for major things like cancer, brain tutor, or heart surgery
If you have serious acute illness, you will not be stuck in a queue. Such a situation would probably be grounds to a lawsuit.
There are sometimes investigative journalism of malpractice cases in the media, but that happens on the private sector too. Yes, many people are often frustrated when they have to wait for their non-acute check up times, but "people dying in queues" as something that would be normal here in Helsinki is a total myth.
The point is, it's absolutely not true that health care in Finland or the rest of Scandinavia is anywhere near as good as popularly imagined by Americans or even by many Scandinavians themselves. Anyone who moves to Scandinavia thinking the high taxes will give complete access to instant top notch treatment in case of cancer or many other conditions will have been straight up misled and deceived.
Pointing that out doesn't imply thinking US health care is preferable or better - I certainly don't.
If you want top notch anything, it's pretty obvious that the privilege is accessible only to billionaires. There's no roof on how much money you can spend on any service. The point of the public health care system is that a basic level of care is guaranteed to everyone, not to provide the most opulent service that money can buy.
[0] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/is-finland-part-of-scand...
The healthcare system here is pretty comparable to the other Nordic countries, although there are some differences. The quality of care depends a lot on your particular health issues and the place you live, though.
As someone who has experience both the US system and a universal system, there are things you get in the US system (if you have insurance) that you won't get in other systems.
Can you elaborate?
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
Never heard of anyone dying waiting for public treatment here in Finland. If you have some life threatening issue you will get treatment right away.
I would say the only one coming anywhere close to that here is the somewhat bad access to mental healthcare that can end up in suicide if left untreated. But based on the amount of homeless people with severe mental illness on the streets of America I don't think things are better there (though beating USA in health care is a really low bar)
Yes if you have some non-urgent problem you might have to wait a few months in the public health care (if you have the money/insurance you can go to the private sector)
Also, just as a sidenote, if you have no income other than governmental income support, Kela will pay these fees. So it is free for those who do not have the income to pay for it.
So, if your condition won't get worse in a few weeks/months, you wait, and get the free healthcare when they have time (within some legal limits). They'll be too busy working on the more acute cases while you're waiting.
You can certainly pay for your own dentist visits. I do - not because the waiting lines (I could just book my annual check at the same time each year and get the visit roughly annually) - but because I trust my dentist, and I want the same person to do my teeth each time. Most people do, I think, because public dentistry services weren't included for adults for decades until 2000's or so. So, you would get public dentists till you're 18 and then pay for your private dentist after that. That actually worked pretty well in its time but now that everyone is allowed public dentist visits there are queues.
You can pay to see a medical doctor as well. There's a large number of private medical clinics that will take you in the very same day. Some people use their own money to buy that service but most commonly people use these via their employer's healthcare benefit or via private insurance. For example, if you have kids you can buy them a private insurance for 150-200€ per kid per year and should they acutely need a doctor you can just take them to any private clinic instead of waiting in the emergency reception in a public healthcare center or hospital. But if it's something really acute you'd be taken in anyway, so many people will just use the public service.
No.
For serious illness or acute accident that needs hospitalization, the public health care is excellent and fast. And it won't bankrupt you, even for the most demanding medical care (usually you pay small flat fee for every day you're hospitalized).
For non-urgent doctor's visits and routine dental care, not so much. Wait times can be long and the system can be quite frustrating. It's a bit better for children.
Most employers in tech sector (and most white collar work, even some blue collar work) will have additional health care benefits that will get you your doctor's or dentist's appointment faster from a private health care provider. You can get insurance or pay out of pocket too.
There is absolutely no issue if your issue is acute or serious with the public healthcare. But as mentioned, if your issue is complicated (e.g. i have an undiagnosed hip issue for a year) it takes ages to get scans and such.
The major thing beyond that perception though is you get a ton of doctors offices who work like mills, they try to get as many patients as possible through each day as possible. Even 'family doctors' as a opposed to 'walk-in clinics' where you don't need to be a 'member' with a specific doctor.
It's because in Canada the get paid for 15 minute (or optionally 30min) chunks regardless if they saw you for 2minutes or 15 minutes. So there's always this underlying pressure to get you out the door.
You have to learn to really pressure them to take your conditions seriously and take them time to review your condition.
Don't get me wrong though, I'm otherwise a die hard capitalist for most areas and still think that public health insurance (not hospitals or doctors) is the moral and better choice. Healthcare insurance lacks many benefits of a market and places like the US meddle with them to death anyway where they aren't true markets, so they might as well be public. Just like prisons, some things should be run by the state, just very few things.
That doesn't match my experience. Several of my classmates who went to major Canadian medical schools also had offers from "top" US schools but stayed in Canada because the quality of education is good and they didn't want to pay $300k+ for their degree. Maybe there's certain top specialists that can only be found at Hopkins or Mayo in the US, but that's not where most Americans are going (even within the 1%).
The doctors I've seen in Canada are equally competent to the American ones in my experience (at "good" but not "world-class" clinics), but I will concede that the American ones take more time with their patients and seem more aggressive with testing and treatment.
Then I moved to CA and got health insurance from work, using UCLA health as my main network.
It's the exact same. I go to see my PCP and she's literally trying to just go through lists of things, is routinely late, and response to 90% of issues is a recommendation to go to another doctor.
Literally the exact same experience.
Cancer etc - yes, you get fast tracked on the public health care system.
AFAIK, that's illegal. Your employer might not cover everything, but your employer cannot dictate what service you can use. I've seen this before where my employer said "we have health care, but you are not allowed to use it". I later on learned that that's totally illegal, they just wanted to cut costs by hoping that people would comply.
Cancer treatment, etc, there will be a waiting list as well on public sector. Wait time depend on the severity and where you live.
If you get in a car accident, have a stroke, drug overdose or get cancer, you get almost free world class treatment in the public hospital urgently.
If you hurt your knee while playing tennis but it doesn't prevent you from working and living a normal life (but you can't play tennis with it), you go on the low priority surgery waiting list for public health care or get it faster from private sector via insurance or paying out of pocket.
Does this make sense?
Even if you don't use the public health care it's there for everyone as a safety net in case something is not covered by your employer or insurance, you are between jobs etc.
What is your level of Finnish now, and how did that progress over the time you've been there?
Is English your first and only other language?
I can get by in restaurants and supermarkets but I stopped studying a year or two after moving here as I realised very quickly that I was spending my day's at work and my free time studying. If I had not done this, I would have definitely moved back home as I wouldn't have had time to appreciate the things I enjoy in life here.
The government here doesn't do enough unless you're unemployed to get you to learn the language. The courses at university are hard to get into and in demand and there's not intensive courses shaped around the realistic work/life schedule of technology professionals.
I don't know a single person who has learnt the language here to the point where they can use it professionally, who hasn't either a) studied intensively or b) been forced to learn it as part of being a student or c) had no choice (ended up outside of Helsinki in a place where English-language skills aren't as high).
Sounds like a market ripe for disruption :) "Finnish for Tech Professionals"
I will say though that my dentist is very busy, and unless you're on a waitlist for cancellations they are basically booked solid 6 months out with all the routine cleanings and checkups. If you're lucky you might be able to get in for non-emergent stuff within a month but most likely you're going to wait 2-3 months to get a call of "we can see you in 45 minutes if you can make it in, I need an answer now because there are 6 other people to call on the waitlist."
If I really have a serious injury or a life threatening emergency, I am confident I will get good care. But I would also be dreading the bill and whether I went to the right hospital in my network etc.
Which country is this? This certainly isn't the America I live in.
Public dental care sucks. For regular checkups and maintenance, go for a private clinic. Yearly checkups, cleaning, occasional minor patching cost me around 200-300 € (edit: if you shop around you can likely find cheaper; I didn't), and I've been much more happier with the whole process. Never got that "we haven't opened our next year's calendar yet, try calling us again in 3 months" from them I got used to at the public side.
For something more expensive, go to a private clinic for diagnosis and get a referral to a specialist at the public side (never had to, but I hear it works).
In Australia they were charging me 7k AUD for wisdom teeth extraction, and they wanted to take me to a hospital to do general anaesthesia... nuts!
In Germany the cleaning procedures were super basic and the doctors were not very careful.
Beyond being very expensive, the dentists are scared of doing certain procedures. I wonder if it's due to liability, improper education, or something else.
Unfortunately many countries still don't treat dentistry as a vital part of your healthcare.
They said it was some sort of strict cultural thing. Everyone wakes up early and you got to get used to that early schedule. And I've been a life long night-hawk.
Not talking just about bars either. I have multiple 24/7 convince stores and gas stations near by. And Uber Eats shows quite a few options at 1am on week nights.
That said, there's no issue in Helsinki. Big shops and malls are open until 8-10, some smaller shops might close around 18 but they have to go home to feed their families.
The 24/7 lifestyle might be convenient, but I've never thought I might need it.
So yes it would be infinitely boring for someone like me to live in a city like that, it's a deal-breaker.
Other stores close 9pm. Bars are open till 2am, night clubs 4 or 5am. Some places stay open but they can’t serve alcohol in the morning hours. Getting food after 12am is trickier but there are restaurants that are open until 4am.
And it’s dark. And people on average go to work early and clock out early. And definitely not new york or berlin nightlife wise.
Talking about helsinki here pre covid regulations.
Edit: reading other comment, it’s true most speciality stores which only have one set of employees close 6-8pm. Larger chains are open till 9pm
Some friends of mine who moved for work to different European countries told me their companies would just provide language courses if the number of 'imported' workers were high enough. Is that not a thing in Finland? Seems like it'd be prudent for them, after spending money to get you to come over, to also give you a reason to stay with some anchoring language learning.
- Work in tech, the company is as international as any back in London, just with a higher margin of Finnish people. Total compensation (take home / benefits / holiday) is pretty much comparable to places I worked in London. I’m not a web developer.
- Not had to use healthcare luckily apart from paying for a COVID test so I could shorten the isolation period on my last trip back. It would cost you more to be ill here - prescription prices for one are higher than in the UK. It feels like a public insurance system and not a National Health Service. NHS has waiting times and I’m sure they do here. Private sector is more established.
- If I earned a couple of 10s of thousand euros either way (higher or lower) then UK taxes would definitely be cheaper but tbh as a portion of my salary it seems about the same. The high taxes manifest themselves as the ‘built in’ price for pretty much everything. Bell peppers (paprikas) are something like 3 times the price as the UK. Neither country grows them at any meaningful scale (crappy example I know)
- The country is effectively an island on the edge of Europe (Finland, not the UK). It has a small population so there isn’t really an economy of scale - this also makes things more expensive.
- Language is a pain. I went to a class to study the basics, and make an effort to pick things up. I can order coffee and beer in Finnish but a lot of the time they switch back to English. I can get the gist of a lot of conversations. Most of my friendship group are friends of my wife or other foreigners. Tbh most of my good friends in London weren’t British so that’s the same.
- Immigration isn’t really on the same scale as London. Yeah as a proportion it’s probably higher but it is a small number of people.
- Education is free in both (student loans in the U.K. are just a tax under a different name. It’s not a loan. I was also paid to do my PhD back there) But here you could choose to study a(nother) masters degree at any point in your life for basically free which would be very expensive in the UK.
- I’m writing all this from my perspective as someone who had a job lined up before arriving. If you are thinking of starting a new life here and you’re not highly employable but have bought in to the American hype about it being a land where the state will provide everything for you then you’ll get a rude awakening. Even as a (not any more) EU citizen I had to provide proof of income to fully register here which ironically the UK never required from EU citizens.
- I had to drive 20km to find a good curry last weekend.
However, if you enjoy family life I would say Finland and Helsinki area are really great places to raise your children. If you enjoy getting rich as an elite programmer, maybe SV would be a better match.
I think part of it is cultural too, and if you are a sort of honest type who enjoys actually working socialism I think you'll find the way of life easier to adapt. Learning Finnish as an adult is difficult (especially if your SO is not a Finn) but certainly in Helsinki area there are a lot of companies that have only-English speaking employees. Really good tech-workers will always find a job if they can just bother applying hard enough. IT-consultancies here seem to attract most of the tech-talent.
Unless you're in a financial hardship, you could pay about 100€-200€ for a private dentist in Helsinki.
Living 10 years in a country and not learning the language is not only stupid. It is borderline creepy. I guess many locals end up seeing you as somebody who has an active dis-interest in their culture. No wonder you have trouble making friends!
Work life balance is great, there’s a beautiful outdoors to enjoy all year, and the people are warm and kind, if not difficult to start with.
All that said, there’s a lot of bullshit and hot air here in this thread:
- public healthcare is great until you have something difficult to work with or non acute. Enjoy the months longs waiting times to see a dentist.
- Yes, you can get by speaking English but your kid and partner might not. The tech industry employs foreigners here but there are countless people I know and hear of who end up here outside of the tech or sciences industry and cannot get work due to the language. Furthermore, don’t expect the same opportunities provided to Finnish speakers as you won’t get half the jobs at least. I work for an IT consultancy and only about 10-20% of client roles are available to me within the company.
- Winter here is shit nowadays. It used to be cold and snowy. Now it’s just like slushy and miserable
- Not all your services will be available in English. I have English banking for example but their department is slow and difficult to work with. Same with phoning utility services etc.
- Yes the language is hard but the main problem is finding time to learn it. Trust me, you don’t want to spend your free time doing it or you’ll just work and study and not enjoy the lifestyle here.
Don’t get me wrong. I love this place but look through the marketing and try and get some real experiences before you uproot your whole life. Happy to answer more questions here or privately (email through website in my profile).