In Finland English = American

If you're still reading this thread, eddiebabby73, I've got some thoughts. After thinking it over. You are right, Finnish people (at least in the rural areas) are not similar to Swedish people. Finnish people tend to be more like the Japanese, i.e. small talk is not appreciated (or didn't use to be). If you had something important to say, you said it, otherwise it was considered polite to keep your mouth shut. Swedish people, on the other hand, have a tradition of this "small talk". BTW, why do you keep visiting rural areas of Finland, if you don't like it?

As a US-born person of Finnish descent currently living in Australia, I thought I would be somewhat qualified to comment. Firstly, I enjoyed the film, quirky and dark as well as comedic (what's with the gingerbread all the time...). Yes the accent was a fail, but don't forget that there are lots of different American accents, which Europeans in a lot of cases fail to differentiate. Having said that US actors are mostly woeful in trying any other English-speaking accent, witness Morgan Freeman in Invictus, Meryl Streep in Evil Angels, and many others - I have actually heard an actor say that Aus/SA/NZ accents are all the same, which is utter tosh, just ignorant. Also, due to the cultural dominance of US media, others including Europeans and especially Aussies attempting an 'American' accent make an absolute crock of it - it's especially funny down here, as I can spot a bad fake accent straight away and the natives are clueless to it.

Also, as far as being ignorant of the world outside your borders, yes you can go to any country and find rural backward people - there's just so many more of them in the US. I'm in my forties, and in my first 4 years of schooling in Finland we learnt English every year - and if we had stayed there I would have left school with at least another 2 languages. Most of my Finnish relatives speak good English, and lots are over 30 as well, so that argument really doesn't ring true.

I've always been under the impression that people from northern US are generally smarter than those from the south - most of the "ignoramuses" come from the former 'slave states', especially the countryside. ...Country people all over the world tend to be slightly more uneducated than those in the cities.

I have a few American friends - one on the west coast (Washington), two on the east coast (Pennsylvania and New York) - and they're all pretty good at geography. American people in general aren't stupid - it's just the US education system is atrociously bad. Most poor people in the US can't send their kids to good schools so they end up with stupid teachers and terrible education. ...I learned this from my New Yorker and Pennsylvanian friends (who both think the education system sucks) so this isn't just an "European trying to seem smart".

PS. Rural Finns don't speak much English because they live in the countryside - they've had to live on farms for the most part, doing farm work and only studying after the work was done. Especially if they're over 30 years old - my dad was born on a farm in 1955 and he doesn't speak any English at all. My mom, however, was born in a small industrial town in 1954 and she knows enough English to hold a conversation. ...As for me, I was born in 1988 in a rural village (yes, rural) and my English is near native level, though I read, write and understand spoken English better than I speak it.

It's actually the same thing with most Finns - we actually understand what you're speaking and we can read and write the language extremely well, but we're too self-conscious to actually speak English even if we could - it's all because we're afraid of making fools of ourselves in public, either due to our accents or due to pauses when we have to think or due to forgetting words. It's a general Finnish trait, I think.

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