Language crisis

Grammar police in action

Last night I had the ever so delightful task of writing a letter to the Finnish social welfare office. While the issue was pretty straightforward, the task wasn't. This time it wasn't the bureacracy that was killing me but the unability to write in my native lingo! I kept writing and erasing and rewriting but it just seemed to me that I wasn't making any sense. This led to paranoia even with familiar and easy sentences and everything I wrote just sounded...wrong somehow.

I don't get to use much of my terrible Finnish these days. In fact, the only time I use it is the once or twice a month conversation I have with my mom and the odd Finnish friend I talk to on Facebook. I guess it's pretty normal to be out of practice in this situation but what worries me is the longer I refrain from using it on a constant basis, the harder it will be to ever manage to write and speak fluently.

It would be little less painful if my English would have replaced Finnish as the native lingo. But it seems I still struggle with words and grammar and even though I'm well able to survive with the every-day business, I still feel like I'm academically retarded when it comes to language. It's particularly difficult as writing was always my best skill and now it just seems like I can't get it out anymore.

It doesn't help that a lot of my fellow students and even the tutors are not any better. I'd love for someone to look at my essays and correct even the little bit of confusion and error in them but at the present situation I get essays back and even I can find the grammar mistakes that the tutor did not notice. Finland in this aspect is completely different, and I've never met so many people completely ignorant and uninterested in writing the proper way and with proper lingo as I have in here. Academia in here seems to consist of fancy words with stupid apostrophy mistakes in between. They have the likes of Joyce and Yeats in their proud literary history but the modern university student can't even spell 'benefit' correctly.

So how do you expatriats (I know you've been lurking around) manage to cope with the lack of Finnish lingo abroad?