Finnish IRL

The unwritten rules

The sauna, the silence, the coffee break. What everybody in Finland already knows, has never had to say out loud, and is not going to tell you either.

5 articles

30 Finnish phrases hiding in one cup of coffee
Ordering is the easy part. Then somebody says pannaan tippumaan 6 min read
Finnish humour is a grammar class, not a mood
Ei hassumpaa is a compliment. It means nothing more foolish 7 min read
Is it rude to speak bad Finnish? 93% want you to
75 per cent draw the line somewhere else entirely 8 min read
What Finns actually say in the sauna, in order
The famous 3.3 million saunas trace to one unpublished bulletin 10 min read
Why Finns switch to English, and the four fixes
She gets answered in English before she has opened her mouth 11 min read

The thing that marks you as a foreigner is almost never a wrong word. It is talking when nobody expected you to, apologising before a sentence in a way that hands the whole table over to English, or missing that the coffee break started because nobody announced it.

None of this is written down anywhere, which is the problem. So it is written down here: what the silence at a table actually means, what is said in a sauna and when, why the switch to English happens and the four things that stop it.