In English it’s normal to say “I love” for many things you consider super enjoyable (food, music, cats etc.) or of people, but in Finnish “minä rakastan” is quite exclusively for your romantic partner. I hear it more commonly used sarcastically (”Oh I just LOVE it when people don’t clean after themselves”) than in a serious context, and even then it’s very rare.
And even when we do want to say “I love/minä rakastan” it’s ridiculously awkward and just sounds wrong. It is more likely to say “you are loved/olet rakas” because that just sounds better and can be used by friends and family too.
But none of this actually tells us why they do not say “I love you” nor what they say instead.
we literally don’t say it because we don’t like the way it sounds in Finnish, and either we don’t say it at all or use the English version.
It’s kind of difficult to explain. Like, the words for “I love you” are so uncomfortably formal, in a sense. It doesn’t roll out of the mouth in the slightest.
Linguistics isn’t my forté, but I’ll try to expand on this;
Words really do have more meaning and weight in Finnishthan they do in English. Finnish words are precise to another level. You mean exactly what you say. There are no take-backs.
I am not kidding. There are synonyms, but even synonyms come with heavy connotation on what the tone of a word is. There are words that come with decades worth of baggage for you to even begin to understand how deeply ingrained their meanings are. We are talking almost N-word levels of ingrained meaning and connotation. When a newspaper journalist makes a mistake and tries to do a take-back, you could never sound as fake is it sounds to a Finnish speaker. You know exactly what you said and meant.
Though we often say that “Finnish is spoken as it is written”, we mean pronunciation. No one speaks written Finnish. Why? Because written Finnish is extremely formal and rigid.
There are vast differences between the spoken and written variants of Finnish. Written Finnish is the standardized, default written format of Finnish. Most published books, like those in school and in shelves are written in that format. That way every Finnish-speaker can understand, even though most dialects can be understood by everyone regardless. It’s the one we are taught in school.
Written language was sort of developed separately from the spoken language, and that shows. It doesn’t quite behave like the spoken language. Spoken Finnish often drops entire words, syllables, vowels, you name it. Meaning and direction of conversation is provided by the speaker and what is spoken, many things can be left unsaid. That’s partly why Finnish personal pronouns are genderless. Since Finnish is an agglutinative language, words bend tremendously and allow for new, understandable words to be created on whim. A lot of dialects affect consonants and vowels, yet it still remains perfectly understandable. Figure that one out.
The way written Finnish behaves sounds incredibly odd in many cases. Written Finnish is clunky. Personal pronouns sound out of place when following the proper format. It doesn’t allow for letters or words to drop. The order of words also seems very stiff when compared to the spoken language. It has some inconsistencies. Very business-y. Because of that, it’s usage is strictly on non-spoken formats. Hence it’s specifically called the written Finnish. No one talks written Finnish.
To perhaps illustrate how rigid written Finnish is, news are read either in local dialect or in plain Finnish (selkosuomi). It’s our language’s equivalent of plain English. It’s on the formal end, but you can actually speak it and not sound like an alien invader. Trust me, we’ll know.
The best way to compare this is if an English-speaking native heard Middle-English. That is how different the tones and verbs behave and sound between spoken and written Finnish.
No one talks like that. I cannot re-iterate that enough. It’s very grating to the ears. Personally, I find Finnish audio-books unpleasant to listen to for that same reason written Finnish is not spoken.
So now that you know these two basic concepts of Finnish language, I can explain why we don’t say “I love you”.
Saying “I love you” in Finnish sounds weird, because “Minä rakastan sinua” is written Finnish.
No one speaks written Finnish.
It’s not meant to be said.
Therefore, the words for “I love you” are never spoken in that particular format.
Even though that is the literal translation, it sounds like “It is I that loves you”. The nearest you might hear is where you drop the “I” from “I love you”, which, actually, still translates to “I love you”, because of how Finnish verbs and conjugation works. “Rakastan sinua” instead of “Minä rakastan sinua” sounds better, because it drops the formal “I”, bringing it a little closer to a spoken format. The word “you”, “sinua” is still in it’s formal version here, but since that is something you cannot exclude, you have to say “Rakastan sinua” or resort to a spoken variant of “you”, so it becomes “Rakastan sua”. To which one would reply the equivalent of “So do I” or ”I too (love) you” “Minäkin (rakastan) sinua”, where the word “love” can be dropped out because the meaning is carried from the previous sentence.
However, It’s still rarer to use.
Instead of “I love you”, we usually say that “You are loved” or “you are dear (to my heart)”, “olet rakas”, because that’s how our language and culture works.
English does not have words for “rakas” that could bring the heart-felt implications like Finnish does. Connotation is everything. Closest you can translate to is “dear” but it’s a very hollow in comparison to “rakas”. It comes with heavy romantic, endearing and sickly sweet connotations. That’s why it’s often supplemented with additional words if you don’t mean it as a declaration of undying romantic love. But the heaviness still remains.
Like, if a friend calls me “rakas ystävä”, “a dear/loved friend”, that is a huge fucking deal. The implications of that level of endearment means that it’s ride or die.
By all means, when a Finnish person says that they love you, it means a hell of a lot more than it does in English. Personally, I find the heaviness of those words intimidating, in a sense.
It’s like a declaration of war but with roses and cuddles.
Finnish is like a heavy, carved boulder. You move it only with precise intention. English is like conveniently small pebbles, easy to throw around all willy-nilly. Effortless. You can’t take “I love you” back, but it sounds lighter and gets the meaning across. Me saying that in Finnish takes years of careful planning, support structures, proper tones and a future intent. It’s almost more accurate to say that in Finnish, you carve a whole new boulder for every single person you say it to. Hence, you usually don’t say it.
It’s also a cultural thing. I’m under the impression that Japanese words and meanings for “I love you” are also very complex for English speakers, due to linguistic and cultural differences.
There are many ways to tell someone that you love, care and cherish them, ranging from platonic to romantic, we just don’t say it in the same clear-cut format as English speakers do.
And to us, love is more about “show, don’t tell.” -R
Y’all know that individual health behaviors – choices around nutrition, exercise, smoking, etc. – only account for about 25% of a person’s health status? The determinants of health are largely social: income and education level, the safety of one’s physical environment (e.g. working conditions, clean water), and degree of social support. Trauma is far worse for health than fast food.
It’s tempting to subscribe to a just world theory, where good things happen to good people (or people who make good decisions), and problems befall problem people, but that just isn’t the world we live in.
Most sick people have spent their lives fighting against oppressive circumstances. They don’t invite illness and hardship with their bad decisions, they are miracles of survival in a sociopolitical environment that’s hostile to their very existence.
(oh look it’s my grad program in a nutshell!)
Yes, this!
People talk a lot about health behaviors – what you choose to eat, whether you exercise, whether you drink/smoke – because they’re believed to be modifiable risk factors that you can change in order to improve your health. You can control how much you exercise, but you can’t control your genes, so let’s talk about exercise! That kind of thing.
But there is a LOT that goes into whether or not a person CAN modify those seemingly-modifiable risk factors. If a person is working two jobs for 18 hours a day and lives in a neighborhood with no sidewalks or streetlights and high crime rates, then as much as they may WANT to exercise to improve their health, they do not have the ABILITY to do so. They know they need to. They know it’s important. But it is literally impossible.
Similarly, if someone lives in an area with no nearby supermarkets, where fresh food is expensive, when they don’t have time (or supplies, or a kitchen) to cook it, then as much as they may WANT to eat healthy homemade meals, they do not have the ABILITY to do so.
In America, we’re all about individualism. We like to think we have All The Choices, and that we can choose to be happy/sad, rich/poor, good/bad, and it’s that easy. But it’s not. Because the ethos of individualism ignores the fact that we live in a society, that we live in a specific context, and that that society and context has far more of an impact on us than it wants to admit.
Example: As individuals, we can all choose to take shorter showers and save a few gallons of water. But commercial organizations, factories, etc waste thousands upon thousands of gallons of water every day. Individuals making the choice every day to save water will have very little impact on the water supply. Regulations forcing companies to save water? GIANT impact.
How this works when it comes to health: We can talk and talk and talk about individuals choosing to change their modifiable risk factors (nutrition, exercise, smoking) until we’re blue in the face, and it’s going to have very little impact on health. There just aren’t a lot of gallons there. People are already doing the best they can within the context of our society.
But if we change that context? Anything goes. ANYTHING GOES.
If we change regulations: Require municipalities to clean up their drinking water. Install sidewalks and streetlights. Ban toxic substances from agricultural, commercial, individual, and all other use. Increase the minimum wage so that people only have to work one full-time job to survive. Subsidize grocery stores in food deserts. Subsidize fresh food in food deserts.
Or if we change access: Provide health insurance for everyone. Improve the quality of health care provided. Provide preventative care.
Or if we change society: Improve our education system. Increase equity. Eliminate discrimination.
….then health will automatically improve. It will automatically improve, on a population level. And individuals? Will automatically engage in those modifiable health behaviors that improve their health status. Because there will be nothing – access, ability, time, and 100 other things – to stand in their way.
I really appreciate this addition. I’m a little concerned based on reblogs that people are not getting the message of the OP which is that while individual health behaviors affect health outcomes to some degree, they do so far less than socioeconomic status… and the exclusive focus on health behaviors in our culture is a dangerous misdirection.
Diet and exercise cannot compensate for the health risks posed by oppression. The stress of having so little control over your life and your work is deadly. The issue for me is not how we might make it possible for people to eat well and exercise more, but how we can abolish the oppressive class system altogether.
my mom is 61 and her bf is a huge nerd and he’s teaching her to play magic the gathering and he had her watch avatar the last airbender with him and his ringtone is terra’s theme from final fantasy 6 and he paints pictures of sephiroth. my mom’s bf is nerdier than i’ll ever be.
and she does all these pinterest crafts and now she makes little bejeweled vials of healing potions for him and his buddies. my little geek heart can’t handle all this.
edit: just picture a 60-something woman with a VERY thick minnesotan accent saying “mike is having me watch the naruto”
just fyi my mom is now 62 and they finished watching “the naruto”
if i had told my 13-year-old self that this is what my mom’s hallway would look like when i was 30 i wouldn’t have believed me
I Was Always On Green Because My Mama Didn’t Play That Shit.
I got a Red for the first time ever cause I launched a basketball at this girls face 😭😭 it was an accident tho I swear lmao
This traumatized so many kids. I knew someone who had no memory of this until I said the phrase “go flip your card” and suddenly they remembered everything
I went from green straight to red because I gave my friend a piggyback ride for like five seconds
America are y’all okay..?
We had to move popsicle sticks into a green, yellow or red can.
I had to move mine to yellow once for “talking out of turn”.
Literally never spoke up in class again.
This is seriously some fucked up shit, jfc.
it’s funny, because it works as a very effective means of discipline/reinforcement. the concept is simple: instead of the teacher disrupting the whole class and stopping teaching to deal with one person stepping out of line and being, themselves, disruptive, they tell you to go turn your card. then they carry on with the lesson while you do it. kidspawn’s school calls it a point out system. you get three warnings, then you have to log into a book. it takes attention away from the mistake and discourages acting out for that attention.
done properly, it puts the choice in the student’s hands. you know the consequence for an infraction, and you choose whether or not that consequence is worth your action. in a perfect setting, it would only be for actual rules, you spend less time talking to school authority figures, and parents wouldn’t flip out about it unless there was a string of repeated red cards. you don’t double punish, after all.
the best way not to get a red card is not to get a yellow card. it really does benefit everyone in a classroom setting if implemented and respected by all who use it. i find it strange that people find this ‘fucked up’. it’s not corporal punishment, which IS fucked up, and it keeps infractions from taking away from instruction time, robbing other students of their education. loss of instruction time is in no one’s best interest.
and in every setting i’ve seen it used properly (both as a student and as a parent) it works exactly like it’s intended to.
I am a teacher working toward my Masters in education, and I spent my entire kindergarten education and third grade (the only two years I had to suffer through a classroom with one of these boards) entirely on red. The Flip Your Card classroom discipline system is in fact unimaginably fucked up.
At first I worked really really hard to try to keep my card on green, or at least on yellow, but no matter how hard I tried, by the end of the day, my mom was getting a phone call all about how I was a problem. I was regularly stripped of every single privilege my teacher conceivably could strip me of. My third grade teacher gave up on taking away my recess because she just didn’t want to have to deal with me for that extra time, every single day. And every single day, there was a bright red card telling everybody, telling all the other kids, telling my parents, and telling me that I was a problem.
Here’s the thing, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t keep my card off red, so it wasn’t this behavior or that behavior that felt like the problem. It just felt like I was the problem.
I did what many kids in that situation do. I gave up. From the outside, it must have looked like I didn’t care that my card was on red, but in reality, I had given up on trying to keep it off red, because nothing worked. It wasn’t apathy. It was hopelessness and despair. In kindergarten, I just checked out and ignored the board. I flat out told my teacher that she could turn my card from then on, because I wasn’t going to. But in third grade, I hit on something worse. Instead of simply pretending the board didn’t exist, I responded to the realization that I couldn’t win by changing the perimeters of what winning was to me. If I was trouble and a problem, I was going to show everybody just how much of a problem I could be. Instead of winning because I made my teacher happy, I won by making everything into a power struggle. Yeah sure, I got sent to the principal’s office and my mom was called, but I didn’t do that thing my teacher wanted me to. Score one for me. That year, I went from difficult to hell on wheels.
This is not actually uncommon, and there are some very good sociological and psychological reasons for why I reacted the way I did. One of the most basic sociological principles is that of labeling theory. This is the idea that people go through life collecting labels, and that these labels affect how we act and how we function in society. People by and large live up to or down to the labels we are given. We can see this in the criminal justice system, where the ways in which we label and treat people, especially juveniles, who commit crimes greatly affects whether or not they will commit a crime in the future, in other words the more someone is treated as a criminal, the more they will act in criminal ways. In a similar manner, being told that you are a bad kid, a troublemaker, a problem, whether outright or through a card system, is liable to convince you of this fact and reinforce that problem behavior. This is one reason why Flip Your Card systems often worsen behavior problems in children with existing difficulties with classroom behavior.
Another failure of the Flip Your Card system is that it has no room for incremental improvement and does not promote reteaching of behavior on the part of the teachers who use it. Most kids with behavior difficulties in the age range where Flip Your Card systems are used are really struggling on learning the rules of behavior and how they should be reacting in a given situation, or learning emotional self regulation. In my case, I had a siezure disorder that wasn’t diagnosed until I was mid-way through third grade, that aside from being misidentified as behavioral problems also prevented me from learning appropriate behavior by damaging my ability to form memories during the period when they were untreated. I also have ADHD, which I can’t treat with medication, because all of them cause me to have siezures. I needed extensive reteaching, and a teacher who was willing to work with me in the moment to help me find better solutions to the situation I was responding to with bad behavior.
Likewise, Flip Your Card systems do not recognize incremental progress. I have a student who just last week refused to come inside when it started thundering, because he wanted to stay outside and spend time talking to his little brother through the fence between the toddler and preschool playgrounds. This is normal for him. Separation from his brother causes him a lot of stress. But I was able to get him to come inside with a little persuasion and a kiss from his brother, and as soon as we were inside, he washed his hands and went to the cozy corner to calm himself down. This is progress. This is in fact the kind of progress that I told his mother about with pride at the end of the day. Once he was calm, I also talked with him about how he should be proud of himself for using some of the skills he was working on to calm himself, and what we could have done differently together outside. Under a Flip Your Card system, his behavior was the kind where he would be required to flip his card to yellow, his progress ignored. What I did instead was to construct a label for him of a student who is working hard on behavior, and affirm for him that I can see the progress and effort he has made. I also established us as partners in helping him reach behavioral and social emotional goals.
Another problem with things like the Flip Your Card system is that much like zero tolerance systems, or any system that are supposed to make things fairer by taking out teacher judgement is that they do not in fact take out teacher judgement. One of the big discussions right now in computing is that the way in which algorithms for job searches or hiring software, or worse algorithms for software used in the criminal justice system, are biased on racial and gender lines, both because of the algorithms themselves and because of the biased information fed into them. This is another example of that. A supposedly unbiased system that becomes very biased because of its nature and because of incorrect input. I already talked a little bit about how students with disabilities that affect their behavioral and social and emotional development are penalized by this system, but another factor is that disabled students, students of color, and especially disabled students of color, are much more likely to be asked to flip their card for behavior that would go unremarked upon for a white or non-disabled student. This is also true of so-called zero tolerance policies. This means that the toxic effects I outlined previously of labeling children as bad fall especially heavily on childen who are already especially vulnerable to being funneled into the school to prison pipeline.
Flip Your Card systems and other similar systems (and throughout this essay I talk about the Flip Your Card system, but Move Your Clip, Name on the Board, behavior charts, and all such similar systems are analogous) also do not promote student choice and autonomy as ouyangdan asserts. They are a classically behavioralist model of classroom management, one that functions on a system of reward and punishments. Reward and punishment systems increase student feelings of powerlessness and decrease their feelings of control. Giving a child a choice between a punishment and doing what you want them to is not giving them a real choice. It’s the same as a bully saying “give me your lunch money or I’ll beat you up, it’s your choice.” These behavioralist systems of classroom management also decrease students’ intrinsic motivation to behave, and replaces it with an extrinsic modivation. This can be seen in my case when my intrinsic modivation to try to behave for my teacher and my fellow students was overriden with the extrinsic modivation of the Flip Your Card board, which didn’t work because I gave up on avoiding the punishment. With my intrinsic motivation leached away and the extrinsic modivation proving ineffective… But this can also be seen in kids who behave well in class. Instead of learning the whys of good behavior and learning to regulate their emotions and reach consensus, and other skills of living in civil society, they learn that to be good is to be obedient and avoid punishment, to please the person In Charge. This is what happened with @thecityhorse higher up in this thread. They learned that speaking up in class brought pain, so they stopped, at a detriment to their education and their psyche.
So why are behavioralist approaches like the Flip Your Card chart so popular? One reason is that for most students they work in the short term very well. Humans like to avoid humilation and pain. This makes them convenient for teachers to implement, even if they cause other problems. Another reason is that they look fair to most adults even though they are not. Also it’s impossible to discount how thouroghly we as a society believe in certain ideas about a child’s place as obedient and subservient to adults, especially parents and teachers, and view enforcing this idea as a good in and of itself. Most people, even teachers, who absolutely should know better, and have in fact been learning better in teaching programs for decades, don’t step outside this paradigm. Behavioralist systems of reward and punishment reinforce this obedience.
Behavioralist approaches to classroom management are so normative that it can be hard to think about what the alternatives to them are, and when I talk to people about the alternatives to behavioralist methods, they express scepticism about the effectiveness of these methods. The biggest method I use is to get to the root of a behavior. Johnny screems during play, which causes Tommy to hit him. Tommy gets scared when Johnny screams in a way that seems aggressive, so we work on reading body language and what to do when we’re scared. Johnny screams because he gets wound up and overwhelmed playing chase, so we work on stopping and leaving the game before he gets that overwhelmed. I do a lot of teaching my students to recognize and name their own emotions, and recognize and name each other’s emotions, and think about what caused those emotions. I teach them ways to calm down, to get what they want and need in acceptable ways, and I build a relationship of mutual respect in which they want to do things for me and for their classmates because they care about us. This is that intrinsic motivation I talked about. And yes, many of the kids I work with have some pretty severe behavioral challenges. This was also the method that worked with me as a child. My fourth and fifth grade teachers both worked hard to develop relationships of trust and respect with me, and worked with me on processing my emotions and understanding the needs and feelings of others. This method really does work, and it promotes empathy, self-awareness, and moral self-reliance, which are important lifelong skills.
YES, all this.
The year I was in 5th grade, we had “the stick system,” which was a lot like this – you start each week with 5 sticks in a little pocket, and for every infraction you have to take one out and put it in a jar. If you ended the week with 5 sticks, you got a prize (a sticker or a piece of candy). With 4 sticks you didn’t get the prize, but there was this recess period on Friday afternoon that was like 1.5 hours long, and you got to have recess the whole time. For every stick after that, you lost some time in recess and basically you had to be in time out instead; you’d sit in a classroom quietly and do nothing for up to 90 minutes. Because the best thing to do with a kid who can’t behave is make them sit still and do NOTHING for a longer period than they can basically conceive of, instead of making them run in circles on the playground.
I was a very quiet, lonely kid; I have ADHD which was actually pretty debilitating as a kid. Basically I found it impossible to do anything except read novels and fight with my sister. So I would always lose my sticks for forgetting to do my homework, zoning out in class, being quietly and oddly disruptive… I never. EVER. had any sticks left at the end of the week. Actually I think once I ended the week with 1 stick, and I was SO proud of myself…and all the other kids usually ended the week with 4 or 5, so the teachers were like “ok so you failed slightly less than usual. Good job?? Now do your fucking homework.” (I paraphrase but that was basically the sentiment.)
The thing is, I was SO EAGER to be liked – by anyone! Classmates, teachers… my classmates just thought I was weird, but my teachers actually liked me most of the time, they just found me really frustrating. Which, fair: I also found myself really frustrating. One time my science teacher was collecting homework, and I (as usual) did not have it. So she gives me this completely fed-up look, and says, “Okay. Well…(sigh) go take a stick.” Completely done. And I have to tell her “I don’t have any sticks left.” She just stares at me for a few seconds, then literally throws her hands up and walks away. And I wanted to DIE. But I didn’t know how to react to that, so I was just stoic.
Maybe she thought I didn’t care, but it was just the opposite – I was this little 9 year old kid who constantly felt like the world was ending because I could never do anything right. I wanted so badly to be good, and I was incapable of doing what they wanted. But they still used the stick system with me, even when it was very clear that it had no effect on my behavior. To this day, I wonder why, after like a month of this technique completely failing to help me or them, they didn’t just scrap it and figure out something else. Was it too much work to teach me? Was it easier to just keep setting me up for failure?
Here’s the rest of that story: the next year, my 6th grade teacher told my mom I’d never graduate from high school (my mom was like “ok challenge accepted you bitch”. Good mom.) Two years later I was given a period of “resource room” every day (basically special ed) where I learned stuff like organization and study habits and refocusing when you zone out (WHAT?! MAGIC!) And then I graduated from high school, got into and graduated from a very good college, got a master’s degree, and then I decided to go into medicine so I took a bunch of science classes and got myself into medical school. Just started my 2nd year, and I did quite well last year so GO FUCK YOURSELF MS FISHER. I did TOO graduate from high school and guess what the fuck else! (…actually she’s probably dead by now so whatever).
My 5th grade teacher, though, the one who had the stick system? She really liked me and wanted me to succeed. She worked with me a lot, but either she didn’t know how to do it right or I wasn’t ready. But they never thought of stopping that stupid system. I still wonder what that year (and subsequent years) would have been like, if they hadn’t let me turn myself into the bad guy in my own life. You should never make a kid feel that crappy.
eff everyone who thinks what attackfish wrote is a “waste of education time”! And the flip your card system and similar ones really are bullying and often it’s like “give me your lunch money or I’ll beat you up” but the kid doesn’t even HAVE any lunch money to begin with, because no one gave them any. Like, it’s not a CHOICE to “behave”/be dismissive and obedient, for a lot of children who literally can’t do that. And shouldn’t have to either because fuck obedience!
queerhomestuck 