What's a good way to explain this......

[Kaylyn]

Just be aware that they'll laugh at your pronunciations. Don't take it personally; they do that to everyone.

Yep, from my understanding, Finns love it when outsiders make an effort to learn their language, and also love to poke fun at them because they rarely have good pronunciation! They good-naturedly call it "huono suomi," the equivalent of Americans calling the English that Japanese speak "Engrish."

I need to work on learning something appropriate to say to the Finnish members of Apocalyptica when I meet them again next month. I was just gonna go with "I love you" in Finnish but Finns don't throw that phrase around NEAR as lightly as Americans do (like, they may say it on a loved one's deathbed), so I gotta figure out something else. Plus, I can't roll my R's properly and the roll comes from the back of my mouth (closer to the R pronunciation in French rather than the trill near the front closer to the R in Spanish...makes sense as I took French for 2 years in high school before attempting to learn Spanish for one semester in college), but I suppose that's about the same as them pronouncing a V as a W at the beginning of a word.

[Andara Bledin]

... but I suppose that's about the same as them pronouncing a V as a W at the beginning of a word.

I don't know about other languages, but in German, if you've got a W, it's pronounced like V... If you've got a V, it's kind of like a hard F.

I took two years of German in school. It was fun, and our teacher had been to East Berlin before the wall came down. Even smuggled some money out. She was totally awesome.