The Yle Kielikoulu – Yle Språkskolan service enables you to study a language by following genuine media content. The service produces translations in dictionary format for Yle’s subtitled programmes.
Yle Kielikoulu - Yle Språkskolan is aimed at immigrants and other language learners who know at least a little Finnish or Swedish.
Yle’s public service tasks also include serving minority language groups. Language learning through Yle’s media content promotes integration into Finnish culture and society.
“Media is an important gateway to Finnish society and to everyday life in Finland. It is important for Yle as a public service media to help foreign-language speakers have access to media content and to provide learning tools for this purpose. Through its activities, Yle should support the opportunities of the entire population to participate in society, shared experiences and the related discourse”, says Ismo Silvo, Director of Public Service at Yle.
Yle Kielikoulu - Yle Språkskolan has been implemented in cooperation between Yle and the Swedish non-profit association Språkkraft.
“We are excited to make the LanguagePlay / SpråkPlay format available to immigrants in Finland. Learning a new language is a real challenge. Yle Kielikoulu - Yle Språkskolan facilitates access to public services and offers unlimited opportunities to learn Finnish and Swedish and understand Finnish culture and society”, says Niss Jonas Carlsson, Chairman of Språkkraft.
In Yle Kielikoulu - Yle Språkskolan, the user watches Yle’s programmes with Finnish or Swedish subtitles. When a user does not understand the meaning of a word in the programme, they click on the word to display a support translation.
Instructions on using the service can be found at yle.fi/kielikoulu. The service is available as an Android or iOS mobile application and a browser version (Chrome, Edge and Firefox) at kielikoulu.yle.fi/ or sprakskolan.yle.fi/.
Support translations for subtitles in Finnish are available in six different languages: Arabic, English, Swedish, Somali, Russian and Estonian. Swedish subtitles have support translations in 25 languages: Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Azeri, Bosnian, Bulgarian, English, Spanish, Greek, Croatian, Kurdish (Arabic and Latin spelling), Mandarin, Pashto, Persian, Polish, French, Romanian, German, Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin spelling), Somali, Finnish, Thai, Tigriniya, Turkish and Russian.
At the end of 2019, the proportion of foreign-language speakers in the Finnish population was 7.5% (language other than Finnish, Swedish or Sámi). Other Yle services for immigrants include news in plain Finnish and Swedish. Yle also reported on the coronavirus situation in spring 2020 in Arabic, Kurdish, Somali and Persian.
In 2016, the Swedish SVT launched Språkkraft as SVT SpråkPlay. UR (Utbildningsradio) has published its own UR SpråkPlay service since 2019.
