<p>Based on extensive travel in Finland for both business and pleasure, I’d say Finland is certainly an advanced country, and that knowledge of English is high in Helsinki. But once you depart from the main tourist/big business venues, it drops off sharply. And with no knowledge of Finnish reading signs or other text is pretty much impossible unless Swedish is also included, since Swedish is distantly related to English as fellow members of the Indo-European language family. Finnish, however, is an incomprehensible alphabet soup to non-speakers.</p>