Valpuri said to me I need to be more brutal in my pronunciation. “Finnish is not French; there is no room for softness, you have to be forceful.” Later she said that English is a romantic language. I never thought of English that way before. It does have a lot of possibilities thanks to its rich  vocabulary. Her idea was that English has the advantages of being popular; lots of romantic things are said in our internationally distributed media. Sweet sayings and sweet talk is normal in English but comes across as creepy in Finnish.  I never thought of English as especially poetic. “English has lots of softness. Englishh hazz lots uhf softness! There are lots of ways to say things in English. If you don’t know quite how to say something, there still always a way to get the idea across, and you can alter your voice in many different ways. Finnish is much stricter. Only in music does it gain flexibility. Then there is more emphasis on the vowels and more possibilities.”