Proposed Finnish profile

Discuss the LLORG's and HTLAL forum's past and its future here.
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Re: Proposed Finnish profile

Postby Serpent » Tue Apr 05, 2016 2:05 am

Its influence went beyond Finland and was claimed by J.R.R. Tolkien to have been the inspiration for some of the characters and themes in “Silmarillion” and “Lord of the Rings”
And conlangs! :D

Movies in Finnish can also provide a helpful diversion for students learning Finnish. A couple of noteworthy directors are Aki Kaurismäki and Timo Koivusalo. For someone interested in Finnish and its related languages, watching the Estonian film “Kinnunen” (2007) or the Russian film “Kukushka” (2002) may be worthwhile. The former deals with differences between Estonian and Finnish as well as stereotypes held between Estonians and Finns. The latter deals with two soldiers who are taken in by a nomad even though each person speaks a different language: Finnish, Northern Saami and Russian.
There are also other movies with Haapasalo, though there's not much Finnish in them.
A music lover who is learning Finnish can use Finnish songs to enhance understanding of the language, while also enjoying the creative efforts of Finnish musicians. Fans of classical music may take a liking to music by Sibelius or Rautavaara, while fans of rock or heavy metal may enjoy bands such as The Rasmus, HIM, Lordi, Apocalyptica and Nightwish. Prominent Finns active in dance or electronic music include Ville Virtanen (a.k.a. Darude), Harri Andersson (a.k.a. DJ Proteus), and Tapio Hakanen (a.k.a. Orkidea).

There's a list here.
I'd also wholeheartedly recommend Apocalyptica to fans of classical music though :P

(with all due respect, does he think that learners are illiterate or dying to hear his chattering?)
a bit harsh imo. given how many people seem to prefer info in video or audio form, I'd just focus on how the audio has way less Finnish content than you might expect.

11) Kato hei! (Maarit Berg & Leena Silfverberg)
- This is a course for beginners in colloquial Finnish and comprises a textbook and CD. The cost altogether is about 100 Euros.

I bought it much cheaper without the CD. The CD is not needed if you have access to any informal content.

As for dictionaries, it can be mentioned that wiktionary is very comprehensive for Finnish and contains the inflected forms.

***If you need to buy Finnish books, you have a choice between Suomalainen kirjakauppa (“Finnish Bookstore”), Akateeminen kirjakauppa (“Academic Bookstore”), Adlibris.com, Bookplus.fi, Info.fi and Ruslania.com. All of these offer online purchasing but beware of shipping costs (see below for more information). Adlibris is a Swedish bookseller which does business throughout Scandinavia while Bookplus.fi, Info.fi and Ruslania.com are Finnish operations. Info.fi sometimes offers dictionaries at lower prices than the competition and was also where I bought a copy of Gummerus' new and large English-Finnish dictionary for 17 Euros rather than the regular price of approximately 80 Euros. Despite its name and focus on selling Russian books, Ruslania also carries Finnish books. Shipping costs to places outside the EU may be high, and combined with customs could make securing Finnish materials more expensive than one would anticipate. In the UK, Bay Foreign Language Books Ltd. carries some Finnish learning materials while in the USA, Schoenhof’s and North Wind Books carry such material. See the subsection “Online material and links to information of interest” below for the URLs of these shops

If you travel to Finland, you can also order books and pick them up from the store or sometimes from an R-kiosk (Adlibris offers this at least). Make sure to allocate enough time for delivering your order. You can also order CD's via Levykauppa Äx. Suomalainen.com and Levykauppax.fi allow you to check the availability of a product in all their stores.

(can you check this for your recs, Chung? ;) as of 2011 is a bit old...)
also the Akateeminen online store is closed. they have a new Swedish owner (and a better selection of books in Swedish, yay), so idk if this has been abandoned completely or they're planning to bring it back.

- A SUPERB website with notes on Finnish grammar, thematic lists of vocabulary, and reviews and bibliographical information of various courses and dictionaries published in Finland.

maybe it should be higher on the list?

Bookdepository has some stuff in Finnish and has free shipping to most countries. (not Russia anymore though... nor Belarus)
FILI's list of the most translated books from Finland
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Re: Proposed Finnish profile

Postby Serpent » Tue Apr 05, 2016 2:10 am

@rdearman, see how this site uses good old HTML to create internal links. hopefully this can be used on wordpress?

i also think i should make a separate shorter page for Russian-speaking learners of Finnish :D
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Re: Proposed Finnish profile

Postby nexus » Tue Apr 05, 2016 4:40 am

.
Last edited by nexus on Sun Apr 24, 2016 1:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Proposed Finnish profile

Postby caam_imt » Wed Apr 06, 2016 8:41 am

Very nice profile, though I only read the first part. May I suggest a little addition to the section on vowel harmony? namely that such rule is broken frequently in the case of loanwords and even old "internationalisms" (sivistyssanat). This is mostly because of a tendency to preserve the original look of the word, rather than writing the way it sounds (though sometimes it is precisely because of trying to imitate the pronunciation of such word). Examples: olympialaiset, pastörointi, rekrytointi, konduktööri, synonyymi, etc. At least I found this confusing when I started learning because nobody told me about this (huge list) of exceptions, and these are quite common, everyday words.
There are also some compound words that seem to deviate from the rule, but actually conform to it, like "yliopisto" (yli <-higher, opisto <-educational institute), since the vowel harmony applies only to indivisible words. Perhaps easy stuff, but as a beginner I found it hard to grasp without explanation.
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Re: Proposed Finnish profile

Postby tiia » Wed Apr 06, 2016 1:11 pm

I never had problems with compound words, but maybe it's because I'm used to them as a German native speaker. And those loanwords mentioned above just didn't come up in the beginning. There's even somewhere an (official?) explanaition how to apply the vowel harmony here, when it comes to case endings and conjugation of such words. I remember sometimes it isn't completely clear, which ending to use and both options are possible.

The only confusing word for us here was "tällainen", as this is neither a loanword nor a compound word. (And when I think about it, minu- being the stem of minä is also not quite logical. It might be that there were very few other words like this, where every form follows the vowel harmony, but from one form to another it sometimes switched between front and back vowels.)
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Re: Proposed Finnish profile

Postby caam_imt » Wed Apr 06, 2016 6:20 pm

Maybe you already know, but "tällainen" is the short form of "tämänlainen". Also worth notice is the word "meri": partitive case is "merta", but other case inflections such as plural partitive contain a front vowel, e.g. "meriä".
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Re: Proposed Finnish profile

Postby Chung » Sat Apr 09, 2016 6:59 pm

Kiitos kaikille avustanne!

For better or worse, I've left out some bits.

tiia:

If you could provide some links to Finnish learning material for speakers of German, please do. One doesn't need to be fluent in the intermediary language to make use of a resource. In this case, knowing enough German to be able to read, make sense of explanations and follow instructions in some course for Finnish is often enough. Besides I've already listed a large German-Finnish dictionary as a potentially useful resource for learners even if they don't speak German by virtue of including the inflectional stems adjacent headwords.

Serpent:

I've worked in your comments where suitable (the old profile from HTLAL also had a link to Wiktionary), and if you have suggestions for learning material meant for Russian-speakers, please put it 'em out there. Understandably Russian-language learning material for Finnish is not my first choice because of what I can get already meant for speakers of other languages (especially Estonian, and German).

However I would rather elaborate on a couple of your other points here than in the profile.

On why I find Finnish harder to learn than Hungarian, it's somewhat subjective. Yet a recurring theme with it compared to Finnish is that I found it to be a little less burdensome to deal with all of the grammatical points in the early stages.

One contrast is how much one needs to have figured out before inflecting. In Finnish, you need to worry about vowel harmony, consonant gradation, the "class" of the word depending on its ending (e.g. the stems of puhelin, huone, keskus, hidas, kirja, kaunis, and tuntematon for nouns/adjectives and tarvita, lukea, kunnella, vanheta, innota, sanoa and muistaa for verbs all vary noticeably), and changes to the final vowel if declining in plural (e.g. lasi, lasin, lasia, laseja, kala, kalan, kalaa, kaloja, omena, omenan, omenaa, omenia/omenoita. For sentences with direct objects, there's also the added complication of figuring out which case to use depending on telicity (e.g. luen kirjan/kirjat/kirjoja, en lue kirjaa/kirjoja, lue kirja/kirjat/kirjoja!).

In Hungarian, there's nothing at all like this. The filters instead are vowel harmony, the "class" of the word (although this is more relevant for verbs, and it's not as varied as in Finnish overall) and regular changes to nominal stems' final -a or -e brought on by adding certain suffixes. For sentences with direct objects, the case is always marked by the same accusative marker (i.e. -t) with the wrinkle instead being which set of verb endings you draw on (i.e. indefinite or definite conjugation). It's much less burdensome on this score than in Finnish.

Of course a fluent or native speaker of either language gets all of the inflection right almost instantly, but it takes some work for a learner to figure it out even though it's not random because of the number of patterns followed. Finnish is tougher though because there are more patterns and considerations.

Where Hungarian becomes a real pain compared to Finnish is in word order since the only hard rule is that the focus of the sentence precedes the conjugated verb with some words or pronouns (e.g. csak "only", mi? "what") always acting as focus. The placement of other elements before and after the verb is guided by a vague concept that the newer information goes toward the end, but this competes with the speaker's ranking of new or relevant information in a sentence.

E.g.

"On Wednesday my friend went to Szeged."
Szerdán a barátom Szegedre ment. or Szerdán Szegedre ment a barátom.

Both are grammatical and have the same meaning. You could make a small argument that the second sentence has the nuance that the new information is that it was my friend who went there but that's a fine point. This makes sense only if the speaker considers that to be new information. The listener may disagree.

On the faded T-V distinction, I'm staying on the safe side and reporting things from this century even though I don't doubt that it was happening in the 20th century. One way I track it is that my older Finnish material from the 1980s (especially FSI Conversational Finnish and Finnish for Foreigners) regularly use te for dialogues involving strangers but Suomen Mestari from 2012 uses sinä regularly in its dialogues between strangers.

On the difference between standard and colloquial Finnish, I've tweaked the profile a bit to indicate how rarely spoken Finnish adheres to standard prescriptions (if they're encountered at all in speech). In addition to the phonological changes (e.g. apocope, assimilation and simplification) here are some other points of the top of my head:

- Using passive forms in speech for 1st person plural imperative or 1st person plural in addition to canonical uses as a passive.
- Practical squeezing out of the potential mood infix -ne- by constructions using adverbs kai, ehkä or auxillary verbs mahtaa or taitaa.
- Expressing possession with genitive forms of personal pronouns (even these are shortened), and letting the possessed object go without the possessive suffix, unlike the standard of using the possessive suffix with the genitive of the personal pronoun being optional apart from instances of emphasis.
- Using phrases with relative pronouns rather than verbal nouns or participles (e.g. Tyttö, jota Chung rakastaa... vs. Chungin rakastama tyttö...; Ajattelen paremmin, kun juon kahvia. vs. Ajattelen paremmin juodessani kahvia.; Mies, joka puhuu Saksasta... vs. Saksasta puhuva mies...)

That contrived sentence Miksi he antavat minulle kirjeen? is there to illustrate my point of how colloquial Finnish rather than standard Finnish more resembles Estonian.
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Re: Proposed Finnish profile

Postby Chung » Sun May 01, 2016 5:42 pm

I've cut down the section with cognates in other languages since I feel that it's ultimately not necessary for learners, despite its value to anyone interested in historical or comparative linguistics.

tiia wrote:That's quite a long list of resources and I even have heard of most of them. :shock:

But maybe I even know about some more book, websites etc. (At least some of them I didn't find immediatly.) Should I add some German resources for Finnish as well?

Btw. Akateeminen kirjakauppa, Suomalainen and Adlibris stopped shipping outside Finland quite recently. (Adlibris has onlinestores for other nordic countries though.) I don't know whether they will start this service again. Another site for buying finnish books would be booky.fi. It's not yet in the list.

I'll post some other remarks/additional info later on.


Serpent wrote:i also think i should make a separate shorter page for Russian-speaking learners of Finnish :D


tiia and Serpent, if you'd like to contribute with some suggestions for German and Russian-based learning materials respectively, then by all means. I'll be happy to incorporate them in the existing profile. Otherwise, I'm quite satisfied with this profile and if there's no additional input from others, I'll then let rdearman know that he can add it to the static site as soon as possible.

Serpent if you'd like to make a Russian version of the Finnish profile, that'd be cool. I'm sure that rdearman could arrange for more than one Finnish profile. tiia, would you be interested in making a German version? caam_imt, how about a Spanish version?
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Re: Proposed Finnish profile

Postby tiia » Sun May 01, 2016 8:04 pm

I still wanted to post a list, right. I just requested access to a FB-group again which has a very good list of (online) materials. (I left the group temporarily, because all the beginner's questions annoyed me a few months ago. - And the group is perfect for procrastination and endless discussions about Finnish grammar. So comments about books I don't own are basically influenced by comments there or on amazon.de.)

I would also add that Suomen kielen alkeisoppikirja (Silfverberg, Lepäsmaa) contains already a lot of grammar. Many series need two books to cover that much. The jatko-oppikirja already covers grammar which is only found in very few books, like the potential mood.

Ok, a first rough version:

Books in German:

Yksi kaksi kolme 1
Yksi kaksi kolme 2
Yksi kaksi kolme 3
by Senja Riekkinen-Gebbert. The first two books of the old series fit together quite smoothly. Since the first book run out of print, there's a new version, which has more chapters and a bit more content. (From what I heard I would recommend the old one. There's a good comparison of both versions on amazon.de.)
Basically the first two books have a lot of easy and short dialouges, sometimes you get to write a postcard or so. Vocabulary is progressing slowly. Can be used for self-learning.
Audio CD and a key are available if needed (or just the whole package at once.) The new version of the first book can be bought without CD or key. Costs: ~31€, for the packages, ~25€ for the books only.

In the third book every chapter has a fairy tale adapted for learners. The fairy tales are each 3-6 pages long. Maybe the new vocabulary is not sooo useful considering one didn't learn so many words in the first two books.
It's a huge step from book 2 to book 3! One should definitely study some other material in between to get used to reading, e.g. news etc. On the other hand the book is rather independent, so also possible to use without knowing the first two books. You will learn how to understand lauseenvastikkeet step by step on a passive basis (long) before you learn how to build the forms yourself. (That's definitely not bad and different from all other books I know.)


Hei! Moi! Terve! by Annaliisa Kühn
The newest Finnish book on the German market (published 2016). It got quite a quite good review and sounds quite promising. Unfortunately there's only a beginner's book, so one has to use other material later on.

Hei Suomi! [one should look up the author]
It's rather old, which one will notice because they're still talking about the Sovjet Union and it includes gender stereotypes. It has a lot of vocabulary from the beginning, some of it being extremly useless, from what I've read. (People noticed words like 'watershed'.).

Finnisch für Sie [would have to look up the author as well]
It will be hard to find a copy of this one, since it is very old and out of print for a long time. But as far as I heard the grammar is well structured.

Also Pons has some Finnish Powersprachkurs or so. (I don't remember the exact name.) The grammar should be quite ok for practicing. A really thin book, so you should use more than only this book.

Grammatikübungsbuch Finnisch by Molan
Grammar excercises on a beginner's level, but probably useful also later on. Including the solutions. The second print got a few corrections, so if possible take that one.

Grundwortschatz Finnisch by Molan
Basic vocabulary with examples, ordered by theme. Got really good reviews. If one is looking for a "Wortschatz" in German-Finnish, this is your choice! (The other ones are not as good as this one, sometimes even just incomplete Google translations.)

Lextra Finnisch (don't know the exact title, but there's only one Lextra for Finnisch) contains mistakes. Don't use it. Every book listed above is better than that.


Dictionaries

Langenscheidt Finnisch
The ONLY dictionary designed for Germans learning Finnish. All the words affected by consonant graduation are marked with a *. Unforunately it's not updated for 16 years or so and contains only 30 000 words. But it fits in every pocket, so useful for travelling. For serious study take one of the WSOY or Gummerus dictionaries. Costs ~10,95€

Finnish-German dictionaries by WSOY
- several sizes available, therefore several prices.

Saksa-Suomi-Saksa by Gummerus
- you can get it for less than 20€. (Seen it also for 50-60€ in a German bookstore, so better buy it in Finland.)
It doesn't really matter whether you take WSOY or Gummerus, if they have the same amount of words. They're both absolutely ok.

If you need really special vocabulary there are the MOT-Online dictionaries. They are VERY good and contain the widest selection of words I've seen so far. Very good also for technical words. As a student of a Finnish university you should have access to them for free. Otherwise they are quite expensive. There are dictionaries for several languages available.



And also worth to mention:
Tarkista tästä. THE book about rektiot. It's a simple liste with examples, but useful and more or less the only* book of it's kind. Completely in Finnish. (There's "Rakastan sinua. Pidätkö sinä minusta" by the same author. The content is more or less the same, but tarkista tästä covers also a few nouns and adjectives, while the other one only covers verbs.)
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Re: Proposed Finnish profile

Postby Serpent » Sun May 01, 2016 9:00 pm

tiia wrote:I left the group temporarily, because all the beginner's questions annoyed me a few months ago.
Totally offtopic but you can unsubscribe from a fb group if you just want to visit it occasionally but not read every post :)
@Chung I'll definitely do that :)
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