About us

About Finnish Language School Association (FLSA)

FLSA is an IRS 501(c)3 non-profit educational organization focused solely on teaching the Finnish Language. We are located in Virginia, USA. Our students are Finnish-Americans or students from the general population interested in learning the Finnish language and something about the Finnish culture. We welcome anyone without regard for race, gender or religion. To that end we are supported by two US based cultural foundations, Finlandia Foundation, and FinnSpark.

We use Zoom and teach our classes in 2-hour sessions on weekends. Saturday is our primary day with sessions taking place in morning or afternoon. We offer 5 levels of courses which are defined elsewhere on this website.

With the modest size of the school and very modest tuition charge, scholarships are not offered.

Classes are interactive and conducted using Zoom. For that reason, classes are small, normally numbering 6 to 12 students, which permits teachers to effectively manage the interaction. Students can expect plenty of personal interaction.

We make every effort to be flexible and place students at levels where everyone is comfortable with the material and learning pace.

Our emphasis is practical Finnish. “Practical” means, our focus is on verbal communication. We also address simple reading and writing skills for formal or informal occasions. Consistent with Finland’s present policy, we present spoken Finnish “puhekieli” for information communication. We do also present formal, written Finnish “kirjakieli” to contrast where it should be used, and to present grammatical constructs.

Teachers will indicate what supplementary reading materials are recommended. We prefer to use available web-based sources.