Eriol's Weekly Finnish Log

[Eriol]

I decided to start a tiny log after all. I plan to update every Sunday with some short info on what I've done during the week, mostly just to keep track of my progress (or lack thereof). This week has had quite a few hours of work but the general feeling is that I'm not making much actual progress at the moment. In short:

- I have "finished" unit 3 of FSI Conversational Finnish, but in reality I can't say I really know the content. My general feeling is that the FSI course is kind of "frontloaded" with too much grammar at the start and I have trouble getting it all to stick. But right now I also feel like I need to move on to new things, just repeating the drills over and over won't work for me and I will just get bored with the same vocabulary. I'm sure I will need to return to unit 1-3 for repetition later though.

- This week's evening class unfortunately was a bit dull and uninspiring. Learned about asking directions and a few postpositions but not much else. Hopefully next week will be better.

- I started watching the Supisuomea videos on youtube. I'm doing this doing this the slow way, checking all unknown words (which is kind of difficult since there seems to be quite a lot of slang used). I've only watched the first episode (out of 12) and so far the difficulty is about right for my current level.

- I read a childrens book called "Antti leikkii" and could understand most of it with the use of a dictionary. (It's 9 sentences in total so not that impressive really.)

- I add all unknown words to Anki and my deck is growing rapidly. It's really hard when almost no words at all are cognates with any language I understand. At the moment the total wordcount is 356 (107 new words in the last six days). Out of those 69 are mature and 30 still unseen. If the amount of new words get totally out of hand I will need to slow down a bit, but right now it still seems manageable.

Goals for next week is:

- Work on FSI unit 4. (My plan is to do one per week even if I don't master them.)

- Quickly repeat episode 1 of Supisuomea and then watch episode 2.

[Phantom Kat]

Awesome! Another Finnish learner! I'll definitely be reading your log.

I dabbled in FSI Finnish years ago when I first started, but I had the same feeling as you: a lot of grammar at once.

Also, I'd never heard of the Supisuomea videos, so I took a look. That looks like something I could definitely watch and learn from.

[cathrynm]

Good luck with Finnish! I study Finnish too (and Japanese).

[Eriol]

Awesome! Another Finnish learner! I'll definitely be reading your log.

I dabbled in FSI Finnish years ago when I first started, but I had the same feeling as you: a lot of grammar at once.

Also, I'd never heard of the Supisuomea videos, so I took a look. That looks like something I could definitely watch and learn from.

I also just found something called Asiointisuomea which seems to be short dialogs aimed at intermediate learners:

https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2015/12/15/asiointisuomea

Click on "Kuntosalilla" at the bottom to get to the first lesson.

[dicentra8]

I also just found something called Asiointisuomea which seems to be short dialogs aimed at intermediate learners:

https://yle.fi/aihe/artikkeli/2015/12/15/asiointisuomea

I was aware about the Supisuomea videos but somehow missed the Asiointisuomea ones. Thanks!
And welcome to the forum. It's great to see more finnish learners.

[Henkkles]

Your friendly neighborhood Finnish person cruising by to let you know I can answer questions about Finnish in pretty extensive linguistics detail.

[Eriol]

It's time for the weekly update:

- I have worked my way through unit 4 of FSI but I will try to do some extra practice on the workbook stuff later tonight. Some stuff start to become intuitive for me but a lot of the grammar points still seem so elusive.

- My evening class this week was a lot more fun than last week. It's still quite possible that I could learn more Finnish at home in those two hours, but I kind of enjoy the social aspect. When being at home with a small baby for most of the day, the opportunity to meet adults sometimes is kind of a relief.

- Watched episode 2 of Supisuomea. Felt like this one was easier than the first one, except for the "Elämä on mukava"-part at the end where I got stuck on some words that couldn't even be found in the dictionary. Had to ask for help understanding what a "tukku" is for instance.

My Anki statistics:
- Total wordcount: 469
- New words this week: 113
- Mature words: 119
- Unseen words: 3

It might be that I will have less time on my hands next week, but my priorities are:

- Homework for the evening class.
- FSI unit 5.
- Episode 3 of Supisuomea.

[Eriol]

In terms of reaching my preset goals, this week was a total disaster. But at least I managed to do some things:

- I did my homework for the evening class, but then my wife got stuck at work and I couldn't make it to the class.

- I haven't even started on FSI unit 5 yet. Decided to just review all the grammar points for units 1-4 instead.

- I have watched Supisuomea episode 3, but not yet finished with looking up all unknown words and adding them to Anki. This episode was mostly about food and felt quite easy.

- Made it through another children's book: Puppe menee uimaan (Spot goes to the swimming pool).

- Joined the rest of the family for a bilingual live show for kids centered around a song in Finnish. This must qualify for the top-10 list of strange language learning techniques. There are some benefits of living in a country where Finnish is an official minority language.

My Anki statistics:
- Total wordcount: 515
- New words this week: 46
- Mature words: 192
- Unseen words: 4

[Eriol]

This week my Finnish studies got more or less back on track again:

- Made it to the evening class where I got some fairly useful practice on present tense verb conjugations.

- Finished FSI Unit 5. Apparently, from now on the units can actually be done in any order. This is probably one reason the first four units are so grammar-heavy, all the basics need to be handled already there. In unit 5 the grammar-points covered were more light-weight and easy. This also made the drills in the work-book feel a bit strange and superfluous. Just rushed through most of it.

- Finished Supisuomea episode 3.

My Anki statistics:
- Total wordcount: 582
- New words this week: 67
- Mature words: 265
- Unseen words: 0

[Eriol]

This has been another week with too little time to actually study enough. Progress feels slow.

- The theme for this week's evening class was past tense verb conjugations. Also very good practice for me.

- Finished FSI Unit 6. I think I will need to take a break from FSI now. This was just boring, the actual content is mostly just long vocabulary lists and not much in terms of actual dialog, the grammar drills are also kind of stupid. I need something better than this.

- Watched all of Supisuomea episode 4, but still haven't checked all new words and added them to Anki. While FSI is getting progressively worse Supisuomea goes the other way and this episode was the best so far with a lot of both useful vocabulary and grammar points.

- Wrote a short email in Finnish to a completely unknown person and they actually seemed to understand it. (This has to do with the upcoming trip below.)

My Anki statistics:
- Total wordcount: 654
- New words this week: 72
- Mature words: 328
- Unseen words: 0

Next week is Easter week and I will be travelling to Finland for a family holiday/immersion camp. Probably won't be much time for my regular studies, but I'm hoping to learn a lot anyway.