Anyone Want to Learn Finnish?

Photo by PoPville flickr user [F]oxymoron

“Dear PoP,

This is a totally random question but I feel that you get much more off-the-wall requests/inquiries, so I am not shy. I recently learned that GW hosts FREE foreign language courses ($100 deposit and you must attend a certain # per semester to get your deposit back – they want to ensure people actually attend classes and care i guess). Here is their website: http://www.thegln.org/

I was brought up speaking Finnish in my family, but since going off to college, moving to DC, becoming lazy and conversing/emailing in english with my family, etc, I have lost all fluency, and dont know that I could carry on a conversation in Finnish with anyone but my mother, who accepts every other word being english. I emailed the GW program asking if they were planning on providing finnish courses as they were not listed in their directory. I got a great response saying in fact, starting in January they will start a course, if enough people sign up. Enough people = 5 people. They told me they haven’t had much inquiry about Finnish and that if I could help bring more people to the course (my Finnish friends) that would be a great help. Problem is, I know no one in DC that has any background/interest in learning the Finnish language.

Do you (or readers) have any suggestions as to where I could reach out to a potential population for this type of thing? Cultural groups, blogs, etc that cater to different backgrounds/languages, etc. I would love to take advantage of something like this, but wouldn’t even know where to begin my small recruitment. Also thought people would be interested in this great program. My friend who took French said it is a complete immersion into the language, and they provide different levels of courses.”

I love questions like this. Anyone have a good suggestion of how to rally a group of students wishing to learn Finnish?