My cucumber hurts

The year is still very young and yet there´s already something to wave my fist at. I´m invited to an official language test on the 14th of January! Don´t know what happens after that, might be that they put me into a different Finnish course depending on how good or bad I´m doing. Language-wise I´m in a state of confusion at the moment. There´s already quite much vocabulary and grammar buzzing through my synapses but the more I know the more confused I get. Sometimes I wonder who will win this fight, me or the language. To quote the once popular and nowadays pathetic ex-ski jumper Matti Nykänen: "The chances are fifty-sixty!"

I have developed a theory over the last few months. It says that whoever invented Finnish got completely burned out while thinking up the grammar part of the language, so this nutty professor was too exhausted to proceed in the same frantic way with the vocabulary. Beaten and breathless he gasped out the words that made it to the dictionary. But tired as he was he got sloppy, so there is a long list of words that have more than one meaning. The semantics however can be entirely and utterly different from each other. Confusing, very confusing! I´m aware of the fact that Finnish is not the only language in which this phenomenon occurs but it seems to me that the latter tends to be exceptionally weird (not only) in this sense.

Just a few examples for the many sources of misunderstanding:
Last month you read "joulukuusi" almost everywhere and I wondered what the heck this "christmas six" (kuusi=six) might be all about.
Maybe the Finns refer to the three magi but being full of good old glühwein they see them double? 3x2=6? Or you need three christmas sixes to celebrate a satanic christmas? Black Xmas 666? Nah, none of the above, it just means christmas tree, goddamnit! And isn´t it obvious? No, it´s not. The word for tree is actually puu but nobody will ever buy, sell or steal a joulupuu in Finland (except me, maybe).

Here´s another thing fitting quite well to the season, cough cough...
If someone tells you: "Minulla on kurkku kipeä" it doesn´t mean that this persons cucumber hurts, although the translation is correct on a word to word basis. But in order to give this sentence a bit more sense I strongly suggest to use the second meaning of the word kurkku which translates to "throat". Aha!
It might pass as poetic and inspiring that kieli means both "language" and (guitar) "string", as a musician I like to think that music is the language that unites the world. But naida? Give me a break already! It means "to marry" and "to fuck"! No sex before marriage according to Finnish vocabulary?
Ei jumalauta...It´s getting weirder all of the time and there is no end to it, the list is streching and so are my nerves.

Wish me luck for my test on the 14th!