For many years, Astron has been working on Finnish high-speed railway projects as a Level 1 supplier for Siemens. This also means that our employees work with Finnish colleagues on a daily basis and sometimes even travel to Finland. Therefore, last autumn, three of our colleagues decided to start learning the language.
Endre Kapitány is one of them, and he told us just how difficult the language is. The fact that it is related to Hungarian doesn’t make it any easier. “Nevertheless, we are enthusiastic, and by the end of the first year, we can already have conversations at a basic level on many topics like travel, introductions, and shopping. Our teacher has lived in Finland for many years, but she’s a native Hungarian, which comes in handy when she needs to explain the basics and grammar to us. Our goal is to pass the language exam sooner or later, but at the moment we are at the basic level, so we plan to continue studying,”, shared Endre, Astron’s control system engineer.
At Astron, one of our employee benefits is that our colleagues can learn languages related to their everyday work. Our courses will continue this autumn. There are usually 25 participants learning languages in small groups of 2–3 people, from basic to advanced. Typically, the courses are in English and German, but since the beginning of 2022, we have added Finnish as a new language. They are mainly held online and run from September to June.
We wish all our colleagues good luck for this academic year!