I very often get asked a version of this question:
I’m preparing for YKI, and I need to pass the writing part. I can’t attend a traditional classroom course, but I don’t feel like I’m making enough progress on my own. Private lessons are over my budget. Is there another way to get feedback from you for my writing?
I’ve designed a course for this specific purpose. It’s called Steps towards YKI: Writing, and the next chapter is coming up in August 2024.
You get access to the course materials on signing up and can start studying whenever works best for you. Then, once the interactive part of the course starts in August, you can share your work with me in a dedicated Telegram group or on Google Docs, where I read your work, comment on it and make suggestions on what to focus on next to get to your goal.
The course is open for enrollment now. Here’s the course page. If you’re reading this after August 2024, the next interactive part of the course will be in January 2025.
How do I know which Finnish i-word is “new” and which “old”? kieli: kielen vs tiimi: tiimin?
My answer:
From your question, I can tell that you know a lot of Finnish already, hyvä sinä! I’m going to start from the beginning for the readers who don’t, so please bear with me.
Finnish has fifteen cases, which are little bits of sound that we stick at the end of words to express things like where something is situated. English, for example, expresses these same ideas with prepositions (which, by the way, there are also a lot of and it can be really hard to know which one to use).
So in English, you’d say for instance that someone is
in the garden.
In Finnish, that would be
puutarha + ssa garden + in
Not too hard, right? As a bonus, no pesky article to decide on. For a lot of Finns, it’s mind bogglingly hard to know if they should say that they’re in a garden or in the garden this time. I don’t know where English gets it’s reputation for being easy to learn.
However, here comes the hard part: a lot of Finnish words change when you stick a case marker on them. For instance, all words ending in nen do this:
suomalainen puutarha Finnish garden suomalaise + ssa puutarha + ssa Finnish + in puutarha + in suomalaisessa puutarhassa in a/the Finnish garden
Whenever a word ends in nen , the nen becomes se:
suomalainen ‘Finnish’ -> suomalaisessa ‘in the Finnish’ iloinen ‘happy’ -> iloisessa ‘in the happy’ Nikonen ‘the teacher’s last name’ Nikosessa ‘in the Nikonen’
The really hard part is, you can’t always tell which word group a word belongs to just by looking at it, and this is where we get to you the question of the day, new and old words ending in i.
When a word ends in i, there are four word groups it might belong to:
1. HOTELLI-words These are the new words that Feik is referring to. In this word group, the endings are just stuck on and nothing strange happens. These words are relatively new loan words, and if you speak English or Spanish for example, you’ll recognize a lot of them straight away.
2. SUURI-words In these words, the i at the end transforms into an e before the endings.
suuri ‘big’, i -> e -> suure + ssa ‘big + in’ = suuressa ‘in the big’ kieli ‘language’ i -> e -> kiele + ssä ‘language + in’ = kielessä ‘in the language’
You might have noticed ssä for in. Yeah, we have two versions of in, ssa and ssä.
Also, SUURI-words are irregular in the partitive case (which literally means a part of something):
suuri ‘big’ suurta ‘a part of a big’ kieli ‘language’ kieltä ‘a part of a language’
3. LEHTI-words As with SUURI-words, the i becomes an e before the ending. Also, there may be a kpt-change, but that deserves it’s own post or three.
lehti ‘newspaper’ t -> d, i -> e lehde + ssä ‘newspaper + in’ lehdessä ‘ in the newspaper’
LEHTI-words are only different from SUURI-words because the partitive is regular.
lehti ‘ newspaper’ lehti + ä ‘newspaper + a part of a’ lehteä ‘a part of a newspaper
4. VESI-words This word group is a group of very old words, from the time where all we had out here was water, our hands, some wolves and years and years of time.
vesi ‘water’ vede+ssä ‘water + in’ = vedessä ‘in the water vettä ‘ some water’ (the partitive, so more literally, ‘a part of water’)
When you come across a new Finnish word ending in i, look it up and see which group it belongs to. A good tool for this is the free online Finnish dictionary Kielitoimiston sanakirja , which is a great quality dictionary carefully refined by language professionals for decades and updated regularly.
There are some clues, of course. If it sounds familiar from English, French, Latin, German, Russian, Swedish etc, it’s probably a HOTELLI-word. If it’s something that’s always been around in Finland, it’s probably one of the other three. If it ends in si,it’s probably a VESI-word.* But there’s really no other option than just memorizing, I’m afraid.
*I edited this part a bit after some comments from a kind colleague, it originally read:
If it ends in si and is something that has always been around in Finland, like susi ‘wolf’ or käsi ‘hand’, it’s probably a VESI-word.
Reading in the language you want to learn is one of the best ways to level up your language skills. But it can be really difficult to form a regular reading habit and stay motivated. Luckily, there are wonderful teachers who can help you do just that! One of them is Hanna Männikkölahti from Random Finnish Lesson. In this guest post, Hanna talks about her new course to help you to read a whole book in Finnish.
Hi there! This is Hanna from Random Finnish Lesson / Private Finnish Lessons, guest posting on Mari’s blog. Mari and I have known each other since October 2017, when she introduced herself to me on Facebook. I had been offering private online lessons for a while, and Mari was just about to start her business. Initially, we chatted on Messenger, but now we also meet face-to-face several times a year.
I’ve been following Mari‘s Steps towards YKI courses, and we’ve talked a lot about online courses that combine independent work with group meetings. I’m excited to announce that I’ve finally put together my own course! It’s all about reading ‘Tuntematon Kimi Räikkönen’ in easy Finnish within a month. You can read a sample of the book here.
In my course, students will read the book on their own, but they will also watch videos where I discuss the book or read it aloud with them. I’ve also curated the best Kimi Räikkönen videos on YouTube and organized them to complement the book as you read. Students can chat about the book as much as they want in my Telegram group, and we’ll meet four times on Zoom throughout the month.
Here’s a link to my blog post about the course: https://randomfinnishlesson.blogspot.com You can listen to a podcast episode where I discuss the course in Finnish. My podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Inspired by this upcoming course and excited about my ChatGPT skills, I finally finished a Memrise course featuring vocabulary from ‘Tuntematon Kimi Räikkönen’.
If you want to join the course, send me an email at hanna.mannikkolahti@gmail.com. I will send you an invoice and a link to the course materials. The early bird price is €39 if you sign up by July 15. After that, the price is €55.
I’m looking forward to having you in the course! I honestly believe there’s no better support for reading a book in easy Finnish. 😊 Best regards, Hanna
One of the questions that I get asked most often is this one. Sure, Finnish is difficult to learn. Learning any language from scratch is difficult, and Finnish grammar is notoriously complex, with 15 cases that may or may not look totally different in their singular and plural forms. So yeah, it’s difficult.
The level of difficulty you’re likely to face depends on a couple of factors.
1. What you’re comparing it to. There are approximately 7000 languages spoken in the world today (it depends on how you count), and I can guarantee you that Finnish is not the most difficult one.
2. What languages you already speak. If you’re already fluent in Estonian, you’ll learn Finnish pretty quickly. The big Indo-European languages like English, French, German and Russian are all related, and so they share a lot of grammar and vocabulary. Finnish and Estonian are from an entirely different family of languages, the Finno-Ugric languages. However, Finnish has a lot of loan words from its Indo-European neighbors, so it helps if you know one or more of them.
3. How many languages you already speak. People tend to think that there’s only so much room in our brains for languages, as if our brains are bookshelves, and small ones at that. Or memory sticks with exactly one gigabit of storage space, and when it’s full it’s full, so you must choose carefully. That’s not how learning works. The more languages you know – any languages, no matter how much or little you know – the easier it gets to learn a new language. If you’re an adult who only speaks one language, English, for example, you’ll have to work a lot harder than someone who’s bilingual from childhood and has already studied several foreign languages. But if you only speak one language, fear not! I’ve seen many, many people in your position learn Finnish and you can, too. But you have to want it.
4. How motivated you are. Learning any new language well is a huge goal and takes a lot of time to reach, and you need to really commit to get there. It helps a lot if you have a concrete reason to want to learn – maybe you live in Finland, or have a Finnish family member. Or maybe you want to spend a holiday in Finland and be able to order your korvapuusti in Finnish.
5. How much of a perfectionist you are. To learn any new language from the very beginning you have to be willing to make a lot of mistakes and continuously make a fool of yourself for a very long time. Perfectionism is the enemy of learning anything, but it becomes a huge problem with a language that inspires memes like this:
Why doesn’t “kirkko” change kk to k in location cases?
Hi Myat!
Thank you for the question! Kpt-changes definitely baffle a lot of learners of Finnish. So here we go, it’s time to talk about every Finnish learner’s favorite topic: kpt-changes also known as consonant gradation, astevaihtelu and kpt-vaihtelu.
Kirkko ‘church’ actually does have a kpt change where one k disappears (kk:k), it just doesn’t happen in every location case. Let’s take a look at the different stems or forms that you add endings to:
kirkko – nominative or dictionary form weak stem: kirko- strong stem: kirkko-
To get to the weak stem, we have removed one of the two k’s in the nominative form.
In this word type, you need the weak stem for most forms of the word, including the location cases Missä (inessive) and Mistä (elative):
kirkossa – inside the church kirkosta – from the church (from inside the church)
We also need the weak stem for all the outside versions of the location cases:
kirkolla – at the church kirkolta – from the church, outside version kirkolle – to the church
For the Mihin or illative form of the word, you need the strong stem kirkko-:
kirkkoon – into the church
Whenever a word ends in o, it follows this type of pattern for kpt changes: the stem is strong in the nominative or dictionary form (kirkko), in the Mihin-form or illative (kirkkoon) as well as in the essive (kirkkona, ‘as a church’) and the partitive (kirkkoa). All the rest of the singular forms are made with the weak stem, kirko-.
This also goes words that end in one ö, u, y, a or ä.
In my day to day life, I get asked so many questions that I don’t really get to answer, and I’m sure that there are many questions that simply don’t get asked.
I’ve created this blog to make it easier to ask, and to make it easier to answer. I’ve decided to write this blog in English, but you can write to me in French, Spanish, Swedish, Estonian and of course in Finnish.
Sometimes i get confused about “niin”, its used so much for different purposes but mostly in puhekielli, is it ok to use in essay or fromal letter or depends on usage ??
Hi Usman! Thank you for the great question!
Niin is used a lot in Standard Written Finnish (kirjakieli or yleiskieli), not just puhekieli (but it’s also used a whole lot in puhekieli). It has a few different uses in written Finnish, here are, in my opinion, the three main ones:
1. Niin kuin – as or like:
Niin kuin alussa sanoin… – = As I said in the beginning…
2. For emphasising adjectives:
Ostin niin ison kahvin, etten jaksanut juoda kaikkea. = I bought such a big coffee that I couldn’t drink it all.
3. With kuin (note that this is different from niin kuin in 1):
Niin pian kuin mahdollista. = As soon as possible.
In spoken Finnish, niin is used a lot more, especially when reacting to what someone else is saying.
– Se on 20 minuuttia myöhässä! – Niin, pitäisikö sille soittaa?
– She’s 20 minutes late! – Right, should we call her?
– Tää kahvi on tosi hyvää! – Niin on!
– This coffee is really good! – Yes, it is!
Kielitoimiston sanakirja has a great, comprehensive article about niin in both written and spoken Finnish, which you can read here.
