A student asks:
One of the most difficult things about learning Finnish so far has been vocabulary. I feel like it just doesn’t stick! Even when I manage to learn something, it shows up in a completely different form. Any tips?
My answer:
Thank you for the great question! In my experience, people are really different when it comes to learning vocabulary, and it takes a bit of trial and error to find out what works best for you.
In my opinion, the very best way to learn vocabulary in Finnish is seeing and hearing the words in context by reading and listening and using them by speaking and writing. No matter what kind of learner you are, seeing and hearing words over and over again, looking them up or asking someone for them over and over again is a must. It’s important to know that it’s normal to need to look up the same word several times before it becomes a part of your vocabulary, first your passive vocabulary and then eventually your active vocabulary. It’s easy to get frustrated when you feel like you “should” know the word already, but it can help a lot to know that this is a normal part of language learning.
This doesn’t mean that specific techniques for learning vocabulary separately aren’t useful, they absolutely are!
Here are a few that are worth trying:
1. Connecting the new word with something that you already know. This can be another Finnish word, but it can also be an image, a word in another language that sounds similar or even something like a feeling that you get when you think about the word.
2. Playing with words, melody and rhythm. Writing little poems, connecting words or sentences with melodies to make songs or repeating words, phrases or sentences in a specific rhythm works really well for a lot of people. You don’t need to be a great writer or a musician to try this technique!
3. Flashcards, especially online ones, are really popular. However, I’ve noticed that while they work brilliantly for a lot of people, not everyone gets great results with them. If you do decide to try them out, I recommend you either make paper ones or go for an app that has some kind of system to help you learn learn. Popular, good quality flascards apps include Anki and Memrise, which both help you learn systematically with enough revision. Making your own can seem inefficient, but writing the word down by hand will help you learn the word much better than going for a ready-made deck.
4. Sticky notes. Write the word on a sticky note and and stick it somewhere where you can see it every day. This really works, but again, it’s not for everyone.
No matter which technique you’re using, make sure you’re learning the the different forms of the word, not just the dictionary form. When learning Finnish, it’s a good idea to learn the word in the dictionary form, but its stem or stems. The stem is the form that you add all the different endings to. Many words just have one form, like kirja ‘book’, but quite a few have two:
puhelin ‘phone’
stem: puhelime-
A select few have four:
vesi ‘water’
stems: vede-, vete-
partitive: vettä
If you’re not sure which forms to learn, check out this post where I explain this in more detail. If you’re at the very beginning of your learning journey, just learn the dictionary form or entire phrases without thinking about the forms yet, that will come later!
What has worked for you when learning vocabulary? Let me know in the comments!
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