#so yeah anyway. I don’t trust any English speaking non Finnish person to get our shit right

[seasonal-depression-of-punk]

I just saw a video of a Finnish kids show that I grew up with. They bastardized everything because they weren’t Finnish.

I hate feeling like a gatekeeper and a bitch who whines about needless shit whenever I see someone mispronounce shit ton of things in my first language. I love when people ask me about my culture. I love explaining media from my childhood that is less known. I love to translate and explain songs that are in Finnish. I love spreading the knowledge of our culture and the experience of being from Finland and living in Finland, that all the different forms of Finnish art tell.

But I hate when it seems like a cash grab.

You took a show from my childhood that I enjoyed and my classroom feared and made it into a video where you don’t say the main characters’ names right. You do a researched video but you didn’t research how our country spells the name of our country’s equivalent of BBC.

Finland is already so ignored in many countries and you couldn’t even try and find a Finnish person to help you with research and pronouncing stuff.

It’s not even just media. It’s also our crimes!! English speaking people who do not speak Finnish have made true crime videos of our worst tragedies like the 2007 Jokela school shooting! It was one of the first school shootings in Finland that was the equivalent of Columbine to us!! It inspired copycats! AND YOU CANT EVEN TRY ENOUGH TO PRONOUNCE THE TOWN’S NAME RIGHT.

I don’t care how hard it is. It still feels so disrespectful and makes me feel like my culture is meaningless. It makes me feel like no one cares enough about our culture. Not even our government who cut funding from our museums. The culture they said they’d protect.

We have to learn English since third grade. We need to know and pronounce everything right. We need to learn how words aren’t spoken the way they’re written. We need to throw every rule of our language out so we speak English the way it’s supposed to be spoken.

And after we do all of this to fit in and we’ll still struggle with speaking the language, we will never feel like we’re fluent enough. We’ll feel like we’re doing everything wrong and that we never make sense because this language we’ve been forced to learn because so much this world has been built to accommodate is too far away from our language family.

And even after this… they don’t have time or enough respect to learn how to pronounce YLE.

And it’s not Y-L-E. It’s just YLE. As in the full name of the channel. “Yleisradio” meaning basic radio. Because that is the channel that has been funded by our government since the television wasn’t here. This is something that is easy to learn. Especially when almost everything that YLE has made is accessible through their FREE streaming service called YLE areena. And if you can’t find it through your web, you can download a free VPN and use that to access it.

I know it may be a bit annoying and it will be hard and take time but remember that every non English speaking person has to learn English. No matter what their first language was.