Take something completely foreign and make it familiar to you. That’s how Irina Pravet approaches learning new words – and entire languages.
Take the word kaunis, the Finnish word for beautiful. “In Finnish, beautiful starts with a cow,” she says. (The letters “kau” in Finnish sound very similar to the word “cow” in English.)
“At some point later down the road, the word turns into what it actually means. You lose the sounds, in a sense, but you innately embody the meaning.”
And meaning is what matters most to Pravet, not words in their technical sense. And she does have a lot of words: she is a polyglot, someone who can speak multiple languages.
“One of those Nordic countries”
Irina Pravet says that her clients have gone from avoiding Finnish to actively seeking out ways to speak more.
When Pravet stumbled across kaunis during her university exchange in Mannheim, Germany, she already spoke Romanian (her mother tongue and the language of her country of birth), French (having learned it in preschool after her family immigrated to Canada), English (from TV and school), and Spanish and German (from having studied them since her early teens).
“I don’t think I’d ever met any Finns before moving to Germany, and the language felt so exotic,” she says. “All I knew was that Finland was one of those Nordic countries up there, but I probably wouldn’t have been able to place it on a map.”
Whilst in Germany, she also stumbled across something else: a young Finnish man. With him, Pravet learned yet another new Finnish phrase: Sinä olet ihana (“You are lovely”).
Contribute, belong, feel at home
For Irina Pravet, language is a tool, not an end goal.
Having followed the ihana man to Finland, Pravet found herself needing to learn yet another language. However, all the courses she took, the homework she did, and the materials she found didn’t seem to help her do what she most wanted: to fit in, to express herself in situations that mattered to her. Previously, she’d learned languages mostly by using them; this time, classrooms and grammar exercises weren’t taking her where she wanted to go.
After the third course she took, she had plenty of grammar in her head without even having the vocabulary to use it.
“It took a lot of banging my head against the wall until I figured out something that would work,” she says.
She decided to put herself – not the language – at the centre. She didn’t want to learn Finnish for the sake of learning it; she wanted to participate, contribute, belong, feel at home. She started to question the assumptions she had held about how the process was supposed to go, as well as some of the advice she had been given.
“Through a number of different epiphanies, I realised that there’s a gap between studying the language and speaking it,” she says.
Starting with what matters most
As a “multibelonger,” Irina Pravet has more than one culture she can call her own.
Pravet has turned her past frustrations into a mission. Her company aims to help people who’ve been studying Finnish to actually speak it.
It’s not a method, she emphasises, but an approach. Just like she herself started to do all those years ago, she now encourages others to put the focus on themselves and use their daily lives as classrooms.
Another important aspect is understanding the circumstances in which people are using the language and how those circumstances might impact the outcome. Pravet points out that being tired, or feeling judged or assessed, ties up the cognitive energy needed for speaking, and understanding that can help people give themselves some grace.
By focusing on what they find most important and what’s making the biggest difference to them, her clients have said they’ve started seeing a path forward. Sometimes she notices the moment when things click into place. It’s immensely gratifying and creates an upward cycle of inspiration.
it’s inspiring for her, too. She’s still learning, as well, and she wants to be really transparent about that. “If anything, I was my first client,” she says.
Now, Pravet can live her life in Finnish, from attending sales meetings and workshops to chatting with fellow dogwalkers and nurturing friendships. She believes that with the right tools, the same is within reach for everyone.
So has she reached her goal? Does she feel like she fits in now?
“I’m a multibelonger,” she responds. “I have several languages and cultures I can call my own. But Finland is definitely home.”
By Anne Salomäki, October 2025; photos by Emilia Kangasluoma
