I had a routine checkup at the doctor yesterday. Afterward, I wrote Jeremy an email saying I was happy of myself because I did the following in Finnish:
-told the receptionist I had an appointment but the doctor wasn't in her office (turns out I had been waiting on the wrong floor for 20 minutes. Nice).
-managed the niceties of sitting down for a blood test. She got my vein on the first try and I told her (in Finnish), "nice job! Sometimes it's important!" She smiled and repeated what I'd said, but with "difficult" instead of "important," which is of course what I had meant to say in the first place.
-told them my Finnish SSN. This is an unwieldy number including both numbers and letters, so it's harder than it sounds. God bless that woman for letting me battle through it for like 30 seconds before I got to the end, and she didn't give up on me once.
-told them my tooth hurts and I wanted to make an appointment with the dentist. I practiced that one ahead of time and the best part was that I got to say it to the woman at the clinic who taught me how to say "I want to make an appointment" in the first place a month or two ago, the last time I needed to say that but couldn't.
Which brings me to today's language tip: if you don't understand something, or if you say something wrong, get through the interaction however you like, but pause afterward to ask your interlocutor to repeat what they originally said, or ask them how you could have said things better. I have learned some nifty everyday phrases this way.
Next on my list in this category is to find out how to tell the bus driver to re-activate a monthly bus card. I had been saying it one way, and no bus driver ever batted an eye, but two weeks ago a bus driver seemed to be trying to tell me a better way to say it. But he was driving a bus and I was trying not to hold up the line, so I didn't catch the details.
Next time!
