“Finnisch mit extra Mühe” -- a group learning project (because Finnish wasn't hard enough before)

[tiia]

Learning to understand spoken Finnish is absolutely important, but learning the standard language is equally important in my opinion. Most articles, books etc. are written in standard Finnish. Maybe they contain some colloquial expressions, but most of the time it's standard Finnish. You could of course read fb-comments or such, but then you do not only have to deal with one dialect, but several. And that would be basically too much for a beginner.

Notice, that not even Finns understand all the Finnish dialects. Friends of mine told me that they actually had to train one guy's dialect a bit off, because they were unable to understand him, when they first got to know each other.

I still find it weird to write down all the changes in the spoken language. I use some of them while speaking, but when I write them down it often looks odd to me.


It will be definitely interesting to see, how you all will progress. Good luck!

[Cavesa]

Thanks for starting the thread, Brun Ugle.
Thanks for scaring me, Hekkles. But considering the ridiculous paranoia concerning the "Czech diglossia", I think we'll manage . I do not try to doubt the information from you, I am grateful for it. The difference between standard and spoken langauge is present in every language, just Finnish might happen to be one of those with bigger difference, that is totally possible. I just think that we'll get through this obstacle, if we stay stubborn enough for a decade or so

I’m not sure exactly how the idea of learning Finnish together as a group came about. Elenia, Cavesa and I had been discussing our interest in Finnish back and forth for a while in each other’s logs, and somehow we ended up deciding to study it together. At some point, Yuurei got a little too close and our enthusiasm sucked her in too. The start date was chosen to fit Cavesa’s schedule.

Where the interest in a language I am "unlikely to ever use" emerged? I blame Serpent. And to lesser extent Chung and others. But mostly Serpent. (The quotes mean that this is the popular opinion people used to throw at me all the time, when I was learning French.)

Why “mit extra Mühe”? I’m afraid that’s my fault. I enjoyed using Assimil to study German and wanted to use it for Finnish as well, but the Finnish course is only available for French and German speakers. I don’t know any French (yet), and my German is still pretty bad, but I decided to get the German-based course anyway. Assimil claims that its method allows people to learn a language “without pain,” but I figured with my poor German skills, this method would be extra painful in my case. As a joke, I started referring to the course as “Finnisch mit extra Mühe” and the name caught on. Eventually we decided to give the name to our group log and to use Assimil as our text, all of us choosing either the French-based or German-based course according to which would cause us sufficient difficulty. We will, of course, be using other materials as well.

Yeah, as if learning Finnish on top of studying medicine in French, both beginning on the 1st September, was a too easy combination
So, I expect myself to use both versions, French sans peine and German mit extra Mühe

The true question is not why we got interested in Finnish or considered learning it together. The true question is what kind of illness I acquired a few months ago. It made me crazy enough not to refuse

So, if anyone would like to join us for some masochistic language learning, you are very welcome. Get yourself a copy of Assimil and join us. So far our group consists of:

Masochistic Finnish learners
Brun Ugle
Cavesa
Elenia
Yuurei

Yep, join the Dark Side! Really.

*Max. 3 cookies/learner.

Now I'm doubting my decision!!!
P.S.Should I understand your message means that you'll bring cookies to the next Polyglot Conference in Berlin, enough for the whole table of excited Finneandertalisch speakers?

[Henkkles]

Oh it's not so much an obstacle as it is something to keep in mind. The southern dialect is syntactically much closer to Average Standard European and you have much less morphology to care for, compared to standard Finnish (I look forward to your efforts at understanding the difference between 'kävelemässä' and 'kävellessä') with its pluritude of participles and other nonsense.

Here's a conjugation table I made a while back for the copula in Helsinki dialect, in case it helps:



1. there is no number distinction in the third person
2. if the conneg. begins with a vowel, sandhi kicks in, so "en oo" is actually pronounced "ennoo" and "et oo" > "ettoo", etc.
3. 4th person, often falsely called the passive (it isn't syntactically anything like the IE passive) just means that an action is happening but who exactly is the perpetrator is not important
4. the glottal stop is not written but I typed it out so that you'll get a hang of where to expect it, it's important because of the sandhi

[Cavesa]

(I look forward to your efforts at understanding the difference between 'kävelemässä' and 'kävellessä'

I think there will be lots and lots of fun even earlier!

[Brun Ugle]

Wow! Thanks to all you experienced learners and natives for helping/scaring us. I'm sure we will appreciate any advice and tips you can give us.

I have actually dabbled a teensy bit in Finnish before, so I am aware of the dialect issues. I don't think they are any worse than in Norwegian though, and I survived that (more or less). So, I'm keeping a positive mind.

I was already planning to get a couple of Glossika courses, so I'll add Finnish to the list. If I remember correctly, the FSI course is mostly in standard, but the dialogues are also read through once in colloquial speech for listening comprehension or something like that. The Supisuomea course has a bit of a mixture. The presenters are foreigners, and sometimes have a bit of an annoying accent, but the course is still very good and there are a lot of native speakers as well. The scenes with native speakers are often fairly colloquial and there is a bit of grammar taught in standard Finnish. At the end of each episode is a mini soap opera in more advanced, colloquial Finnish. When I was dabbling in Finnish a couple of years ago, this part was cut off on the YLE website, but included on the YouTube videos. I assume it hasn't changed and that's why I linked to both.

I can add more links to the links page if anyone has any good online resources to recommend for beginners like us.

[Brun Ugle]

(I look forward to your efforts at understanding the difference between 'kävelemässä' and 'kävellessä'

Hmmmm. One's got an m in it.

Ha! I'm a genius!

[Elenia]

(I look forward to your efforts at understanding the difference between 'kävelemässä' and 'kävellessä'

Hmmmm. One's got an m in it.

Ha! I'm a genius!

But the one withthe m also has one less l!

Thanks for setting up the page for our joint effort in ridiculousness! I believe Ani is also interested (although she started early and is currently travelling, and so prbably can't say yes or no either way...)

[Chung]

I'll just pimp the links in the profile

I echo Serpent's advice. Learn the standard language first, and then move onto colloquial Finnish. However this isn't to say that one should learn so much of the standard language before looking into colloquial Finnishh. Some of the participles and infinitives (in addition to infixes) that Henkkles alludes to are covered in intermediate or advanced courses for the standard language but in speech or informal texts these elements are replaced by relative clauses or adverbial constructions. These features would be more familiar to anyone speaking any SAE language.

In my experience, I started to feel comfortable taking on the colloquial counterparts of standard grammatical features after having gained a good grasp of the following in its standard guise

- pronunciation / matching sounds with letters
- present indicative tense*
- simple past (preterite) indicative tense*
- compound past (perfect) indicative tense*
- present conditional tense*
- pluperfect indicative tense*
- imperative* (just for the 2nd person and think of the remaining forms as fixed expressions see **))
- 1 participle (just the 2nd active past particple; the other 4 can wait)
- 12 cases (the 15 canonical cases minus instructive, abessive, and comitative)
- 2 infinitives (learn the "short" form of the 1st infinitive and the 3rd infinitive. The other infinitives aren't used as much but knowing how to form and use them would be handy if you were advanced)
- pronouns and relative clauses
- basic stock of vocabulary comparable to what'd you get in a beginner's course like TY Finnish (maybe around 1000 words passively)

* including negative conjugation patterns of these tenses, and so you'd learn the connegatives too.

** Whenever I encountered passive forms as a beginner, I thought of them more as fixed expressions rather than items to be learned by focusing on the rules to form them (even then they're not unduly difficult to figure out but I still wanted to lighten my burden). For example, I got myself used to looking at ollaan as just the colloquial way of saying olemme "we are" or mennään (vaan)! "Let's go!" as the usual and less stuffy way to say menkäämme (vain)!. The 3rd person imperative with -koon, -koot etc. can be pretty much ignored by a beginner seeing that maybe the only time he/she would encounter it is something like onneksi olkoon! "congratulations!"

[caam_imt]

I guess I'm late to the party, quite a lot of useful stuff has been said already. Ei muuta ku lykkyä tykö!

EDIT: Hahah I guess I was a little tired, I wrote that wrong

[Iversen]

I haven't got time to learn Finnish right now, but your discussion reminds me of the 'imaginative' learner in Earl W. Stewick's excellent book "Success with Foreign Languages":


I can cite one technique that I don’t recall having used in
either German or Russian. It was to devise tables which would present to me all of
the significant inflections of the nouns and the verbs.’
‘Devise tables?’ I thought. ‘Carla could never have done this! And there’s no
evidence that Ann or Bert did, either. ’ ‘Inflections,’ I repeated. ‘You mean the basic
form of a noun or verb with all its endings and combinations of endings.’
‘That’s right. And these tables let me see on one sheet of paper what was
happening in the structure.’
‘You got a bird’s-eye view,’ I said.
‘Yes. And by so doing I was able to isolate what, for my memory process at least,
were key distinctive features.’
‘That is, the features that you had to notice if you were going to keep track of
what was going on.’
‘Exactly. I found that taking say, the declensions of the noun, I had to deal with
them one at a time. There are so many of them in Finnish - there are so many types
of endings depending on what sort of stem you have. And an additional
complication of Finnish is that the whole word can be transformed depending on the
ending. The visual shapes of the inflected forms may bear very little resemblance to
the nominative form that you find in the dictionary.’
‘That does sound complicated,’ I agreed.
‘Yes. So at that point, quite early on, I got into drawing up these tables for
myself, which then helped me to isolate the pattern, and to categorize the nouns by
families. And consequently when I came to the practical use of the word, I was able
to recall that it belonged to that family, and once having made that identification, it
helped me to get a grip on the whole set of forms.’
(...)
For instance, in one of the cases of Finnish, it helped me that I noted
mentally that if you had a double vowel in the ending of the singular, you had a
different double vowel in the plural.’
‘An abstract observation, but you found it useful.’
‘Yes. Or with the verbs it became absolutely essential for me to know that the key
to the whole thing was the simple past tense. If I memorized that and the infinitive, I
would not have any difficulty, usually, with any other part of the verb.’
(...)
it turns out that Finnish seems to have underlying it a type of
mathematical structure, so that by writing the words out, and lining them up in the
correct way, I got visual patterns.’
(...)
And it seemed to me that once I had done this, it was like inputting
into my own mind. It wasn’t something that I visually recalled when I was trying to
decline a word. It was a way of putting the information in - into my mind. I had a
feeling - almost a physical feeling - that “OK, that was enough, the information had
gone in and it was there.“’