Have you ever procrastinated until the last moment on something which will have significant consequences to the rest of your life? Well, I haven’t, until now that is.
I have my finnish language exam on tuesday and now it is 4pm on a sunday.
I actually have studied for the test already a bit, but way too little to have any meaningful effect, so this is my story of studying with a very limited time span.
The test on tuesday is basically reading comprehension, but instead of asking some specific questions about the text, you are asked very broad questions about the text. For example: “Analyze the argumentation and its efficacy in this blog post.” and there would be a blog post and you need to analyze the arguments in it and its efficacy. Duh. We did mock tests a while back and it had an exercise something very similar to that and then a few days ago I got some feedback on how I did. I need to pull up the notes from my laptop. I do not have them on my main computer now. Here they are:
Doing the practice exams themselves as they are won’t be fast enough. You need to write around like 7000 marks for each one of the practice tests if you wanted to do them the official way, so instead of writing a whole text I am going to write essentially bullet boards of the observations which I have made from the text. Maybe I will do like one in the official way just to see how it goes.
Also another thing is that I should only focus on stuff which brings me the most bang for my buck so to speak. For example the grammar stuff is practically useless, since you end up wasting precious hours on grammar exercises and you will at most get a couple of points more, even assuming that you write perfect finnish. The stuff from the bullet board which are a) easy to fix and b) bring a lot of points are the second one and the very last one atleast and then after those the third through fifth. Writing shorter sentences makes the text more understandable and brings more points at very little cost. All this to say that we will not be doing any grammar exercises, because they are basically useless.
In addition to this, I think I will use the pomodoro technique which a lot of people have hailed as the holy grail of studying. It basically consists of very high intense concentration studying and then doing nothing related to studying for like an half an hour and then another hour of studying and so on. I think that this will help keep my motivation and avoid burnout.
Also another thing which I think I missed in the mock exam was that I did not use the appropriate terms like “kertoja”=narrator or “teesi”=thesis etc etc which can be used to analyze the text. I basically wrote the text as I would talk normally (aka not use those words) which lost me a great deal of points, so in order to remember these terms I should do a flash card thing for these terms, such that I can remember them in the test.
Ok so for the next couple of hours of pomodoro I will study the terms with a flashcard program such that I can get those down. Then after that I will focus on fixing the problems which I said previously.
Now, looking around the internet for a list of terms related to literature and media texts etc etc is actually quite hard. They are sprinkled here and there, but there does not seem to be a complete list anywhere, except the book. Now the book is bad because you can not copy paste the terms and the definitions from it, so I will have to write them manually to the flashcard program which I programmed. Well, I guess that is more practice for me.
…
and holy shit. There is a list of all the terms and their definitions at the end of the book. Thanks to whoever made this!
Now, there are all of the quite obvious terms so I will pick only the most hardest for me out of the list, because duh.
Ok so now it is the end of the first hour long pomodoro session. It is 17:13 local time and now it is time to do something entirely else for the next half an hour. I think I got quite a bit of the terms done, atleast now I remember them somewhat more clearly. I am probably going to just jump straight into writing the mock exams, because I do not think that there is that much advantage to study the terms after all.
Ok so now the break period is over (now it is 17:41 local time) and it is time to start to write the mock tests.
I am going to start with this: https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2017/09/05/2017-syksy-aidinkieli-tekstitaito , because I just picked one randomly.
In the first task there is two short poems about children and you are asked to analyze what kind of picture they make of children. The other one tells about a baby Hitler and describes how sweet said baby hitler is. Now, obviously this poem makes a very innocent and sweet picture of the baby hitler and this is of course a message that people usually view children as innocent and sweet, even though they may become complete monsters later in life.
Now, the poem does not really say anything else other than that a child is usually sweet, and I really can not make anything more of the poem. I am going to try to still write something about it before looking up the answers.
Yeah, I got some of the stuff which were required according to the answers, but not all of the stuff. For example the question also asked to analyze childhood in addition to a child and I did not pick up on the fact that when the poem tells “Maybe doctor?” or “Maybe lawyer?” it is referring to the childhood in which the child can form their own perception about what they want to become as an adult. I completely missed that part. Anyway. Now I know better atleast.
The next task is about an advertisements which advertises ready-to-go meals. The task is to analyze which methods the ad uses to attract customers.
First of all, the advertisement is in the form of a letter. This creates a more personal connection to the possible recipient. Also the big text at the top says that the letter is directed towards “Anyone who eats food” so in other words every-one. This may spark a possible customers interest in the advertised food produce.
Another way in which the ad attracts customers is that it initially asks the reader: “If ready-made food has a bad reputation, where should its’ embetterment start? From yourself.” This is a rhetorical question used to make the viewer think.
The ad, like many other ads, tries to create a personal and emotional connection to the people who produce the product and therefore by proxy an emotional connection to the product itself. For example: “Me olemme keravalainen pieni ruokatehdas.” and: “Toivomme, että annat sille mahdollisuuden ja kerrot meille mitä pidit siitä.” . This creates a very personal tone to the advertisement even though it is shown to who knows how many thousands of people.
In addition to emotion, it also prays upon the personal values of each possible viewer. Even though the “letter” starts with “To everyone who eats food…” it is actually directed at people who have specific values, namely that they appreciate local food, that they appreciate quality food “Meille tärkeintä on ehdottomuus laadun suhteen ja jatkuva reseptin kehittäminen.”, also that they appreciate traditions (“joka on yrityksen ja erehdyksen kautta opetellut jo yli 10 vuotta hyvää perusruokaa.”) Here the word “perusruokaa” refers to traditional finnish quisine (and obviously the ten years part also refers to tradition). The reader is assumed to share these values of tradition and appreciation of quality food.
Also another quite surprising way the letter tries to attract customers is that according to it, it is a personal letter from the CEO of the company itself. This in a way is a weird appeal to authority, because if some run of the mill employee wrote this, then it wouldn’t carry the same weight, but when the (alleged) writer is the CEO of the company, then it adds a lot more weight to the message, because the reader feels that the promise to make great food is more sincere.
Now looking at the answers I failed to mention the familiarity which the ad brings and also I totally missed the sense of nostalgia, which the ad tries to somewhat convey. I also forgot to mention the wider context of the advertisement. It is an ad in a newspaper and I also did not mention that the text seems to be written with an old school typewriter instead of a computer. (Well, of course it is written and carefully edited with a computer but it is made to SEEM like it was written on a typewriter.) . I also missed that the assumed core values of the reader also includes openness and that the reader values home cooked meals, because the letter first starts by making a rhetorical question to the reader who is assumed to be critical of ready-made meals.
That is about it for that task. And also now it is 18:47 and it is time to take another half an hour break. I am actually really liking this pomodoro technique, because I think that I can actually focus on the task at hand, because if I try to focus on stuff for longer than an hour my mind starts to wonder.
…
Ok the “break” was a bit longer than I thought. Now it is 19:54, so instead of taking an half hour break I took an entire hour break, but it doesn’t really matter.
The next task is to figure out what kind of a person the main character is based on the language used in the text.
The person in the text is basically a Karen. Some other person had passed the writer and a rock flew from their car to the writers windshield causing a slight crack in it. Also the person in the text writes about having to pay 40 to 60 euros for the repair. Also said person wonders how much that is in marcs (old currency in finland). This shows that the person is atleast somewhat old, because the person can remember the value of the mark, so the person is frugal and probably relatively old.
The person is quite quick to anger since the person basically is blasting the other person and even reported the incident to the police.
Now again looking at the “correct” anwers or what I should have noticed yes i noticed that the person is probably old, but I completely failed to mention what kind of values the person values themself. For example, in the correct answers they say that the person is most likely conservative in his/her views of the world, since the person says that making coffee is the job of the woman in the house and in addition the person mentions conservative politicians in a positive light in the text (“Paasikivi”)
Ok so I didn’t have time to write the other part for this yesterday, but I think that the exam went surprisingly well all things considered. Then when the results arrive I will probably get a reality check but until then I can thankfully be blissfully ignorant.