Naava wrote:I haven't noticed this, but I don't live in Helsinki. There are some new loan words, but not that much that different generations would struggle to understand each other.
I mean, the generational thing is mostly just old people being bitter about young people using words that they don't use (or not using words that they do use), like how my mum for example uses old Helsinki slang words borrowed from Swedish or Russian where I'd use English loanwords... she's not bitter about it, though, and I've noticed my dad has been "updating" in this regard so he's not bitter about it either AFAIK, but some old people are. Older people also use idioms or whatever that are presumably calqued from Swedish or Russian (or actually originally Finnish), while younger people use ones calqued from English.
As far as dialectal differences go, well, sure 99.9% of what someone younger than 50 or whatever from pretty much anywhere says is understandable, but there's different slang and also older people might sometimes use cases or syntax that aren't used in Helsinki (anymore).
I can't think of any examples of anything right now, though, except for a general thing my parents keep telling me about: when my mum first went with my dad to Savonranta (where my grandpa on my dad's side was from and where we had a summer cottage until a couple of years ago), she couldn't understand anything anyone was saying, like the dialect there was so different and the accents were so thick that it might as well have been a completely different language. Even my dad, who IIRC was born there (or maybe he was born in Helsinki, I'm actually not sure if they moved here before or shortly after he was born), keeps telling me about how he always struggled with understanding the locals. What's weird is that I don't remember any difficulty with it, but then I was like 10-12 the last time I spoke to anyone there (after that it basically became a ghost town and we barely ever saw other people when we went there in the summer) and it's not like I was having deep conversations with anyone, so eh.
Naava wrote:What do you mean? I know there are things we could change, but I wouldn't call it a joke yet.
At least the way WW2 was taught when I was in school was, well, not accurate... it was like "we were neutral and totally the good guys! what do you mean we were an Axis country? the Nazis occupied us and we fought against them just as much if not more as we fought alongside them, and when we fought alongside them it was TOTALLY separate! we had NOTHING in common with them ideologically! also Mannerheim did nothing wrong" but I guess every country has nationalism problems in history education.
PE was kind of a joke at least in middle school, too, since me and my best friend got permission from the teacher to just go on walks practically every time, so obviously in practice we just walked really slowly and sat around or whatever. I mean, I still think that's a good thing because the alternative is forcing kids to work out and beat them if they refuse or whatever, but you know.
We also had a literal Nazi (as in an actual Nazi from WW2) as a math teacher for some time in eighth grade, he was absolutely ancient (to the degree that other teachers joked about it to us) and came back from retirement because there weren't any other math teachers left who were qualified enough. Once, he marked an answer I had in a test as wrong even though my best friend had put the same answer and he got it right, and when we asked him about it, he was like "well I guess it might be possible that I made a mistake" and fixed my rating on the test. He told us several times that he missed the times when he could legally beat students, and as you'd expect, he ended up getting fired for beating students.
Back when I was in middle school, some elementary schoolers had to move their classes to barracks outside the school because of mould or whatever, and those barracks are still there.
I could think of more problems, but the exact problems of course vary from one school to another, probably more from one part of a city to another and even more from one city to another, etc. Still, I've heard things have only gotten worse since then in every way, evident from the reports that illiteracy is on the rise, and although I don't know anyone who has kids so I don't have any actual knowledge about how things have changed, it's pretty clear from how teens practically seem to think they're American in every way and make tons of mistakes in both spelling and grammar and throw in tons of (misspelled) English words everywhere... I mean, I can't 100% confidently write in formal literary Finnish either, but at least I can mostly do it. Teens nowadays can't even write informal spoken Finnish in any consistent way.
...which wouldn't be a big deal since languages change over time if it wasn't for the fact that it's happening as part of a general decline in pretty much every kind of knowledge/ability. I've heard teens are now just as stupid with technology as old people, and it seems to be true based on some of the examples I've heard like them falling for obvious scams.
That rambling was kinda off-topic, but...