Recently, I’ve seen people advertising themselves as English language teachers in various Finland-related jobs groups on Facebook. Unfortunately, some of the “teachers” are so bad that their own Facebook profiles and/or web pages are full of spelling and grammatical mistakes, as well as odd phrasing that native English speakers would never use.

This really disturbed me because I used to teach English in Finland and have a university qualification for it. But unless the law has changed recently, English teaching in Finland is unregulated, so anybody can set up their own language teaching business or even a language school. I’m worried that people are getting ripped off by unqualified trainers feeding them worthless language courses. When your English isn’t fluent, how can you decide who is good and who is not? 

Your best bet is to go to a reliable language school, where you can be sure that the teachers will be competent. A reliable school has a good reputation, and is registered with international language teaching organisations. 

If that’s not possible due to your budget or location – especially if you’re signing up for an online course – make sure that you check qualifications. Note that being a native English speaker is not enough. Many native English speakers don’t use good grammar themselves, or they don’t know the details of English grammar well enough to explain it, or they’re just not good at teaching. And don’t dismiss non-native speakers, who can be perfectly good English teachers if they are skilled enough.

Therefore, find out whether your prospective teacher has a university degree in linguistics, English, or another second language. If not, do they have a TEFL certificate from an accredited organisation? Even without academic papers, a teacher can still be excellent, but the absolute minimum is references from former students. Any one of these is good, and the more of these qualifications they have, the better you can be sure your teacher will be worth your time. If they refuse to tell you their qualifications, or claim that it’s irrelevant, steer clear. That’s somebody hiding their incompetence. 

We live in difficult times, and many people believe they can set up training courses on the Internet to make a living. That’s fine, if they know the topic and can present it in an interesting and educational way. However, you’re wasting your time and money on courses being run by teachers who don’t know what they’re talking about. 

When you study a language, you’re investing in your future. So put a little effort into ensuring it’s a quality investment.

As I write this, LinkedIn has over 690 million members and is used in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Whether you’re networking, seeking clients or looking for a job, LinkedIn works best when people notice you and you interact with them. So how can you make your profile stand out and get attention?

You start with what you put in your job title and the About section at the top. After the photograph, these are what make the strongest impression and encourage people to read on. Yet many people post weak text full of the latest business buzzwords and not much substance. The result is a missed job opportunity, lost customers, a poor reputation – or all three.

LinkedIn is a professional place, and your profile should reflect that. As an experienced copywriter, I’d like to make three suggestions about how to make your introductory text better.

1. Use proper grammar, spelling and punctuation.

LinkedIn is supposed to show your competence.  Even if you’re not working as a writer, you probably have to write something in your job – a report, a case summary, or at least emails. People expect a well-educated individual such as yourself to be able to communicate in a professional way. If you can’t write clearly, who’s going to hire or do business with you?

A lot of people who use LinkedIn in English are not native English speakers. That’s fine, but it doesn’t give you an excuse to write poorly. You are showing off your skill with a second language. Make sure you look skilful.

A fresh pair of eyes can really help. Whether English is your mother tongue or not, don’t wing it. Get somebody to proofread your profile. 

2. Don’t use a pretentious job title.

Some people, especially those who are self-employed, like to give themselves an edgy job title like “Management Wizard”. But this is just silly. Your job title is meant to summarise your work role. It is not supposed to be an attempt to make you look like the coolest kid in the school playground.

Here are three of the most ridiculous words I’ve seen used in job titles on LinkedIn. 

badass – going against the norm is obvious by your actions. If you have to tell people that you’re a badass, you’ve actually just said that you’re not.  The word “ass” in this context is also mildly and intentionally vulgar, as if that makes it more exciting. I recently wrote a blog on swearing in business. Don’t do it.

ninja – this sounds absurd in any field that doesn’t actually require physical stealth. Nobody engaged in IT, marketing, management, presentations, networking or any other field of business is a ninja. Unless your job is martial artist, spy or paid assassin, leave it out.

thinker – everybody thinks. It’s an activity, not a job title. Even philosophers, maybe the closest to pure thinkers, have to philosophise (speak or write) once in a while. Define your job by your role (e.g. CEO) or your output (e.g. writer). 

Most people use a conventional job title, but there’s nothing wrong with an unusual title, or even no title at all. In my own profile, I use a descriptive phrase that captures the essence of my work and leave the title to the Experience section. Whatever you choose, just be sure that it makes business sense, so readers know what you do. 

3. Stop using clichés and modern business buzzwords.

It’s very tiring to sift through LinkedIn profiles full of rubbish. You’re here to be noticed, but that won’t happen if you fill up your profile with meaningless jargon. The people who impress others the most don’t try to “fit in” with common clichés – they are just themselves.

A good rule of thumb is to avoid terms that describe what everyone should be anyway. You can test this by checking if you could be the exact opposite and still be effective. For example, many people say they have a “can-do attitude”, but would anyone describe themselves as having a “can’t-do attitude”? Of course not, even though they know that they “can’t do” everything. Think instead of what you are really trying to say about yourself and write that. 

Here are five more clichés you should avoid in your LinkedIn profile. They never really made sense in this context, but they’ve been so overused, they’ve lost whatever meaning they did have and need to be replaced with something better. 

demonstrated history – this is a very common term on LinkedIn. But what does it actually mean? If I have a “demonstrated history of writing blogs”, then I’ve written some blogs. Be clear in your expression – why garble the message with this strange phrasing?

good at both teamwork and working independently – every competent adult should have the interpersonal skills to work in a group and the ability to work alone, because every office job requires one or the other all day long. If you want to highlight a skill, such as group facilitation or high-speed typing, say that. This vague, generic phrase adds nothing.

passionate – everyone’s passionate about their work these days, so it won’t make you stand out. But why even use it in a business context? True passion is highly emotive. I like to say I’m enthusiastic about my work, but I’m passionate about my girlfriend. It would sound very odd the other way round. Find a better word and save your passion for your personal relationships.

reinvent – a quick search of LinkedIn reveals many people who claim that they can “reinvent” business, manufacturing, or even whole workplaces. Yet it’s almost always an exaggeration. People don’t reinvent everything – it would take far too much time and effort – but “tweak” doesn’t have the same ring to it. What about “upgrade” or “improve” or even the trusty “develop”? 

…in my DNA – your biology is in your DNA. Business growth, marketing, entrepreneurship and your professional skills are not. Tell us how good you are at these things with real evidence of what you’ve done.

Every time I see these words in a profile, I roll my eyes. And I’m not the only one.

The best writing is clear and to the point. With a lack of skill, originality and effort, you fail to give a clear picture of who you are, what you’ve actually done, and why that recruiter or client should choose you. Take the time to craft good text and you’ll get more out of LinkedIn.

Some years ago, when I used to teach English at a prominent multinational company based in Finland, I had a group of three students every week – a technical writer, an engineer, and a sales guy. The first two were quiet in the endearing way that only Finns can be, and I really had to encourage them to talk. But it was hard to get the sales guy to shut up – he was very extraverted and loved to tell entertaining stories. 

Unfortunately, he also loved to swear.  Every week, when I’d ask him about his weekend, he’d say something like this: “I took my f*ing customers out on my f*ing boat to my f*ing cottage and we all got f*ing drunk. It was f*ing awesome! Those guys can f*ing drink!”

Already shy, the writer and the engineer were even more intimidated by this bravado, and his colourful language made them blush.

Swearing was a part of daily life when I grew up in Australia, and still is. People there swear a lot, and it’s not easy to embarrass me with language. Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with swearing itself. It’s just words. Words can even lose their strength when you hear them too often. But words do have meaning and context. In my language class, I felt uncomfortable and my students were blushing because the meaning and context were not appropriate. I have not written those words in full in this blog for exactly that reason.

Generally speaking, swearing has no place in day-to-day business.

Why not?

Let’s consider what swearing is. It’s the use of profanity – forbidden words that hold a lot of power. In most parts of the world and in most languages, children have been taught from an early age that using certain words is bad, and this produces a feeling of disgust in many adult people when they hear them or read them. 

But words that were considered bad not so long ago can change in strength. When the movie Gone with the Wind first came out in 1939, Rhett Butler’s famous line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” was controversial. Today, it sounds almost innocent.

Mostly, swearing covers social taboos such as sex (e.g. f*), bodily functions (e.g. sh*), religion (e.g. the aforementioned “damn”), and words describing social groups (e.g. the n-word). In many countries, people feel the group-based swear words are the worst, because they are specifically meant to cause harm and divide people. Here in Finland, I’ve managed to offend some people when I’ve used “perkele”, which roughly translates as a colloquial word for the Christian devil. Even though people are not very religious these days, it still feels bad to many.

Let’s consider why we swear. It’s a strong expression of emotion that other words can’t convey. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, you’re going to say something strong, because it hurts! When an unexpected event causes sudden physical or psychological pain, it can generate strong, instant emotion inside you, so you swear. Sometimes we do it to express amazement, like when a street magician performs an astonishing trick. But it’s frequently due to negative emotions. Consider your most recent stressful emotional experience. You probably swore at about the time when it happened, and maybe afterwards in your frustration. 

However, adult people who are in control of their emotions don’t swear much.

Who swears most often? Teenagers are renowned for swearing a lot because they want to impress their peers, it’s an act of rebellion against the adult figures who want to control them, and they are learning to control their emotions. Usually they grow out of it.

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay became famous for swearing on his cooking shows. Being offensive was his gimmick to draw people to his programme. A lot of comedians swear to sound edgy, rappers do it to be cool, and the bad guys in movies often swear a lot to sound tough, because not caring what other people think is part of playing those roles. 

It could be that the sales guy in my English class didn’t feel the strength of what he was saying because he wasn’t swearing in his native language. Being vulgar in a second language doesn’t have the power of your mother tongue. Maybe he’d been inured to it, since he’d heard English swearing in so many films and done it so often himself. 

But other people who hear it don’t always see it that way, especially if you appear to be fluent. They think that you should know better. 

I can promise you that most people don’t appreciate frequent swearing in a business context. Because it’s a way to express strong emotions, you’re going to come across as aggressive, insensitive and frustrated if you swear a lot with your customers. People want you to be in control of yourself when they’re working with you. They won’t want to discuss important issues and negotiate, because they’ll believe you’re thinking with feelings rather than facts. Sensible adults are not impressed by swearing and won’t do business with you because they think you’re “cool”. In fact (although research does not confirm it), many people believe that those who swear a lot are stupid.

This is not the impression you want to give your customers. Keep your language clean and mannered, and you will project an image of intelligence, ability and diplomacy. Swearing is not necessary. 

In a recent blog, I mentioned that I’d joined the Migrant Entrepreneur Network’s management team of Suomen Yrittäjät, the Federation of Finnish Enterprises. Our kick-off day in February was a lively event, at which we came up with several goals and an action plan to pursue them during the year.

As you well know, the business landscape has changed quite drastically since February. The coronavirus has come into our lives and affected absolutely everything we do.

The small businesses that Yrittäjät represents have been hard hit by the virus, and that means migrant entrepreneurs, too. Some examples might be nearby cafes, or language schools, or business trainers (like myself). Very few have not been affected by the coronavirus in some way or another. Migrants are famous for starting restaurants serving the cuisine of their country of origin, but eateries have been affected very badly, since they all had to shut down except for takeaway, and were no longer allowed to serve alcohol.

Businesses affected by the coronavirus have access to plenty of support services around the country, but migrants don’t always have a full set of resources due to language barriers or even just a general lack of knowledge of how things are done and what is available during a crisis such as this in Finland. So our Yrittäjät network has been providing migrant-owned businesses with helpful information on its website. 

These two sections have been adapted for coronavirus times:

Now, during coronavirus time, there is a new page that includes extra sections such as:

  • A series of videos in several languages for a quick review of the most important points
  • Mental health support
  • How to register for unemployment status while keeping a business forced to close due to coronavirus operating in the long term
  • Where to find business financial support

I have not provided the full list of what’s available here, because things can change quickly as the government and other parties react to the latest developments. I recommend that you check out the information page to see what is available at the moment. 

One positive thing about the situation is that as a team, we haven’t had to change our goals. They are still:

  1. Improve collaboration with stakeholders.
  2. Add more information to the Yrittäjät website.
  3. Raise awareness of Yrittäjät, its services and influence among migrants.

What we have changed is the action plan. We’re not being quite so face-to-face, doing a lot of it online via our website, via email or over the phone. At the beginning of June, we will have the second of our four yearly meetings, and it will be entirely over Microsoft Teams video chat.

These weird times have made it a challenge, but so far the team seems to be running well and we are an enthusiastic, hard-working bunch. Everybody has been making contributions, but I’d like to offer special thanks to Chairman Ali Giray and Network Manager Aicha Minai for leading us.

It’s our sixteenth birthday! I would like to extend a big, warm THANK YOU to all of my customers, business partners, mentors and friends who have helped me with Koala Consulting and Training from the start way back in April 2004 until the present day. 

This year has proved challenging for everybody. In January, 2020 was looking really good, and then the coronavirus hit us. Everything changed within a matter of weeks.

Working from home has not been a problem for me. Although my face-to-face training has been mostly paused except for a few video chats, I’ve able to continue with writing and editing, and I know I’m very lucky to have this option. It hasn’t been the same for everyone.

I’ve also continued doing pro bono work. Last year, I helped with the PDP programme at Aalto University. This year, I’ve been guiding newcomers to Finland and foreign-born people newly unemployed due to the coronavirus on how to write a good CV and LinkedIn profile and look for a job. I’ve looked for a job here myself, and I spent a number of years in recruitment, so I have both the practical experience and an insider’s knowledge of what is required.

During May, we expect that coronavirus restrictions will be slowly lifted, but we can’t really have a party for this birthday as social distancing is still required. However, I would once again like to thank everyone who has worked with me throughout the last 16 years. Without you, none of this would be possible. I invite you to have a beer in quarantine to celebrate!

Stay well and stay safe and I look forward to seeing you again soon.

With the outbreak and spread of COVID-19 around the world, we are facing an unprecedented global challenge. Everybody must do their part to help fight the novel coronavirus.

Therefore, I will not be conducting any face-to-face training with clients or producing any marketing films until the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Finnish health authorities tell the public that widespread social distancing is no longer required in normal day-to-day life.

However, if you are self-isolating or engaging in social distancing, it’s an ideal opportunity for you to develop your writing ability. After we discuss your needs by phone or email, you can send me a document for feedback. You’ll get an engaging task to stop you getting bored, you’ll have adequate time to complete writing exercises without rushing, and you’ll add to your professional skills. 

Get personal coaching via video chat on any of my specialist topics – presentation skills, writing, and culture.

You can use my copywriting services as you normally would, because they can be easily provided over email. As the economy slows down this spring, now is a good time to get your documentation ready and make it really good for when business picks up again later in the year. Work on your web pages that badly need an update. Create a new brochure describing an upcoming product. Make a new presentation slide deck for a teleconference. Develop a speech to inspire your people to keep going. Start a blog to stay connected with your customers.

Please feel free to ask for copywriting or proofreading services at any time.

As I said at the beginning of this post, we have a big challenge ahead of us. Although health is the highest priority, the economy is going to be hit hard. If it’s possible, keep your business open, because it will help to limit financial repercussions, but don’t do it at the expense of anybody’s health, including your own.

When you do business, stay safe and protect yourself, your colleagues and your loved ones by taking the right precautions when you must have contact with others and doing as much work as possible remotely. 

The current situation is not permanent. We are going to get through it together. 

I look forward to our continued cooperation during this crisis and beyond.

I’ve been a member of Suomen Yrittäjät – the Federation of Finnish Enterprises – since 2008. It’s the largest organization representing small- and medium-sized companies in Finland, and a good way to get to know other entrepreneurs and how to run a business.

Although I’d used their information services from time to time, I hadn’t been as active as I could’ve been, so I finally decided to do it differently. Suomen Yrittäjät has a range of networks that connect entrepreneurs across the country to share ideas and activities. I’ve been in business since 2004, and felt I had something to offer. 

So, in late 2019, I applied to join the 2020 Migrant Entrepreneur Network’s management team and was accepted.  The team is a very diverse group of foreign-born and native Finnish entrepreneurs who provide support and guidance to migrant entrepreneurs operating in the Finnish business environment. You can see some of us in the photo above and meet us all here.

Yrittäjät held a kick-off day for all their new committees and networks on February 8, 2020 at Bank, a small event venue in downtown Helsinki. Here the new team met face-to-face for the first time to get to know each other and define our mandate for the coming year. 

We discussed a lot of points, but we understood we had to focus on just a few if we really wanted to get things done. So we decided on three main goals:

  1. Improve collaboration with stakeholders.
  2. Add more information to the Yrittäjät website.
  3. Raise awareness of Yrittäjät, its services and influence among migrants.

We’ve got an action plan to pursue these goals, but we’ll alter it as necessary as the business landscape changes over the year, so I won’t elaborate on it here. I’ll report on what we do as things happen.

The photo at the top of the page shows us after our meeting in the main hall of Bank. After this, the management team is scheduled to meet four times in 2020 to review our progress on the goals. We’ll also attend other meetings and events as representatives of migrant entrepreneurs in Finland. 

The first of those other meetings was when the Minister of Finance Katri Kulmuni invited us to have lunch with her on 4 March. Several of us went to discuss our concerns as migrant entrepreneurs over a bowl of salmon soup. You can read about the event here.  

It’s been fun so far. I’m looking forward to working throughout the year with this fantastic group!

The photograph was kindly provided by Global Business Forum International – Finland.

On December 10, 2018, I wrote about the preposition “on”. On March 31, 2019, I posted an article about the preposition “at”. Please read those again if you’d like to review their grammatical properties.

Remember that prepositions are there to show the relationship of one thing to another, or the position of an object. The most common types of prepositions refer to time, place, and movement.

Here’s a simple sentence: “The dog is in the bath.”

In this English sentence, “in” explains the relationship between the dog (a noun) and the bath (another noun). In this example, it is a preposition of place.

Generally speaking, we use “in” like this when we want to say that something is located in a defined area, usually with some kind of clear borders or edges – that spot can be physical, like a bath, or abstract, like a sentence. When the dog is in the bath, it’s not on the floor, or in another space like a cupboard, or outside.  You know where the edge of the bath is, so you know where the dog is. The animal is not somewhere near the bath, under the bath, or over it. The dog occupies part of the physical space of the bath. 

Around your home, the dog could get out of the bath and then be in various locations – for example, in the garage, in the bedroom, or in the kitchen. These rooms are specific areas inside your house, where the walls define the space. The dog could also be in the back yard, in the front yard, in the driveway, or even in your car. These are places outside your house, but you know where they start and finish. The yard probably has a fence, the driveway might be gravel or some kind of paving, your car has a metal shell that encases you when you operate it.

You can make this bigger. Your house and its yard are in a suburb, the suburb is in a city, the city is in a region or state, and the state is in a country. There are nearly 200 countries in the world. However, we are on Earth, because the planet has a physical surface. “The world” is a more abstract concept, and each country is part of it, and therefore in it.

Remember, you travel in a taxi, in a truck, or in a rowboat, but you are on a plane, train, bus, or ship. However, you could be in the cockpit, in the dining car, in the luggage compartment, or in your cabin, respectively. If it’s smaller, you’re more likely to be in it.

Despite referring to all this transport, “in” is not a preposition of movement. You cannot be in your bed without getting into it first. “Into” leaves you in something. 

Look through a telescope, and you might see some stars in the sky. Read some articles in a newspaper and an exciting adventure story in a book. You might see somebody you know in a photo…or even in a movie or a television show! Perhaps your cousin is in a school play, and your seats for that play are in the middle of the row. These are all defined places. 

You might think that a hospital is a defined place, and it is – but it’s also an exception in English grammar. If you’re at a hospital, you might work there, or maybe you’re just visiting. When you’re in hospital, that means you’re a patient receiving medical treatment. Similar rules apply to jails – being at a jail is quite different to being in jail.

“In” can also be a preposition of time. Just like space, it’s a defined area of time, with a beginning and an end. If you arrive at the airport in time, you get there before your plane leaves: the time starts when your plane arrives at the airport and ends when the plane takes off. Parts of the day are specified: most people don’t drink alcohol in the morning, but they might have a drink in the afternoon or in the evening, but you go to sleep at night. Then there are seasons, months, and years – it’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. Christmas is always in December. The Second World War ended in 1945.

One use of “in” that sometimes confuses non-native speakers of English is when people mention the state of affairs existing after a fixed period of time, starting now. You could argue that “in” is valid here because it refers to the aftereffects of what might happen during that period. For example, when making a business plan, a CEO may have to estimate what the economy will be like in five years’ time. That means five years from now. And lunch will be in half an hour. This indicates 30 minutes from now.

Perhaps you’ve seen “in” employed in other ways too, but these are the most common ones when it’s working as a preposition. How else have you seen it used? 

At the start of 2019, I went back to Joensuu – you can’t keep me away from my Finnish alma mater – and to Kuopio in central-eastern Finland, both in the depths of winter. It was colder than -20°C and in that weather, my devices still worked, but I was surprised to note that the cold somehow drained the batteries if I took my phone or tablet out to take a photo. Maybe one day somebody will find a technical fix for that; clearly, not yet. In the summer, I also visited Tallinn, the rapidly-growing capital of Estonia, that seems to be markedly different every time I go there. 

Copywriting, editing and proofreading were all in high demand this year. I worked with Aalto University, helping students refine their presentation skills for the exciting end-of-course Gala. A number of business events highlighted the fact that presentations in English are becoming more important in Finland as many fledgling companies want to expand internationally. 

In my free time, I continued to read as much as I could, meet new people, and develop fun new skills in cooking and amateur magic (sometimes they seem to overlap!). 

The year 2020 will start with an intensive programme teaching presentation skills at a client organisation in the financial sector. As the year proceeds, I will be developing courses for people who are already good presenters but want to brush up their professional vocabulary in specialist English courses in information technology, human resources, and medicine. 

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of my clients and business partners in 2019. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year!

Koala Consulting and Training will not be operating from 21 December until 1 January, 2020. However, please feel free to send an email if you have something to ask or discuss.

I’ll be back in business on 2 January. See you next year! 

We’ve all heard the phrase “lost in translation”. It was even the title of a 2003 movie starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. Anybody who has had to interact with people who do not speak their own language as natives is familiar with how subtle meaning can easily get lost. 

When you first start learning a second language, you tend to be literal, because you use your mother tongue as a reference point. But after you develop a degree of fluency, and you start to think in your new language (and even dream in it!) you switch over to automatic pilot. This is the point at which you no longer have to search for words and they just flow from you as if you’d been speaking them all your life. For most day-to-day activities, that’s fine. But if you’re talking about something you don’t often discuss, or you have to deal with a subject that requires nuance, it’s easy to use phrasing incorrectly, and expressions that make no sense in your second language can easily slip through. 

Once I was talking with a Finn about buying cars, and he mentioned that a lot of smoke had been coming out of the “exhaustion pipe” of a second-hand sedan he’d gone to inspect. My ex-girlfriend used to ask me if I wanted “crashed potatoes” with my pork chops and that sometimes I made her “go to bananas”. So far so good – a fluent or native speaker can guess the meanings of those (in case you didn’t, they are “exhaust pipe”, “mashed potatoes”, and “go bananas” respectively). But when my work colleague invited me out for “an evening of male bondage”, I had to clarify what he meant. Turned out he just wanted a beer and a chat! The term “male bonding” had eluded him that day, so his brain picked a phrase that was close. We had a good laugh about it.

You might think that it’s easy for me to make fun of people speaking English as a second language, and you’d be right. Because English is so widespread, garbled examples are common, and there are even books and websites devoted to such things. Unfortunately, the ubiquity of English has made some native speakers arrogant, with the attitude that English is somehow superior to other languages, so they don’t even bother to try to learn any others. But this is lazy and ignorant. Not only does learning another language aid communication and understanding, but research shows that because it multiplies the number of neural connections in the brain, it reduces the risk of dementia.  

I should be absolutely clear that everyone learning languages has the same problems. But it’s nothing to worry about. Making mistakes is the main way you learn, and if you can have a few laughs along the way, it makes the learning process less stressful and you might even be more likely to remember what you did wrong.

Here are a few from my own experience of using Finnish. The word for “salmon” is “lohi” and the word for “snake” is “käärme”. But a “lohikäärme” is not a salmon snake; it’s a dragon. The first time I went into a shop and asked where the eggs were, the sales assistant started chuckling. The word “munat” is slang for testicles. You have to add the type of eggs at the start – “kananmunat” (chicken eggs), or “suklaamunat” (chocolate eggs) – to prevent the anatomical reference. 

When I told my (same) ex-girlfriend what I wanted for Christmas, I used the literal translation “Minä haluan sitä huonosti” – “I want it badly”. Unfortunately, in Finnish, that means the exact opposite of what I meant. I should have used the word “kovasti”, or “hardly”. But that didn’t come readily to mind because in English, to do something “hardly” means you don’t really care about it at all! Needless to say, neither of us got the presents we wanted that year.

Despite all this, don’t let the fear of making a mistake in your second language stop you from talking or writing. They’re going to happen from time to time, and as I’ve tried to demonstrate here, they can sometimes be amusing. Funny errors are perfectly OK when you’re just having a chat or writing a casual email. 

But when you’re making an important speech, get somebody to check your script. Even if you don’t stick exactly to the script, at least be clear in how to phrase the main points. And when you’re making a web page, or writing a brochure that will be printed on paper, be particularly careful. These are your calling cards. Mistakes in these contexts can also be funny, but too many errors could undermine your professional credibility and a serious misunderstanding might turn your clients, business partners, or other interested parties away. 

If you are not a native speaker, but need to use a lot of English (or any other non-native language) in your business, I recommend that you get a native speaker to check your text as often as possible. If you can find someone to join your team, so much the better – you can consult them anytime. But if that’s not feasible, then use a professional, native-speaking proofreader. Your business success might depend on it.

These language issues make a lot of people crazy, so please feel free to “go to bananas”. Or any other fresh fruit. It will be a welcome break.