I’m a serial language learner. Oh, I don’t reach fluency, nowhere near. I have a degree in French and Spanish, I’ve been learning Norwegian semi-seriously on and off for nearly six years with the intention of becoming… well, not fluent but potentially able to get by if I moved to Norway. I learned enough Russian and Ukrainian to be able to read the Cyrillic and get by for three weeks/five days respectively. I had a go at Arabic because it would be useful for work, before discovering it’s just too different and therefore difficult for me to learn on my own on Duolingo. I had a go at German because I always wished I could have learned that at school instead of Spanish and fell over when Duolingo introduced cases without even mentioning them but I understand a certain amount of Tourist German because of living in Switzerland. I had a brief shot at Polish and an even briefer shot at Welsh and I think I did a handful of introductory Hungarian lessons. Now I’m learning Finnish.
If you follow me on Twitter, I’ve talked about it a bit. Finnish is the one major European language I have no reference for whatsoever – I can get by in Italian, Portuguese and Romanian because of what I know about French and Spanish, I can get by in Dutch, Danish, Icelandic and Swedish because of what I know about Norwegian and German, I can get by in Latvian and Lithuanian because… well, I suppose they’re not related but I don’t remember looking at them and seeing gibberish. I look at Finnish and I see gibberish. I see a lot of vowels, a lot of double letters, a lot of umlauts. I don’t see verbs or adjectives or nouns. It’s not related to any other language except Hungarian (which Hungarians deny) and Estonian (which people don’t seem to mention and yet even I know, even at this stage, that they share some words). So I decided it was time to start learning some basics. Not with any intention of becoming fluent, just with the intention of it no longer looking like gibberish. And what made me think of it was reading Icebreaker.
I’m quite excited. Partly because of filling in that geographic language gap but partly because Finnish is from a whole new language family. I know about Romance languages. I know about Germanic languages. I know a tiny bit about Slavic languages and an even tinier bit about Celtic languages. But this is Finno-Ugric and that means it’s going to do things I’ve never seen before.
So, I’m a month in. What have I learned?
- Finnish uses non-gendered third person singular pronouns
Or to put it another way, there’s no separate “he” and “she”. That must make it easier when it comes to people who, in English, would use other pronouns. Finland isn’t going to have the pedants pointing out that “they” is plural while somehow managing to use it in the singular in the very sentence they’re pointing it out in, and it isn’t going to need an equivalent of “xe/zie/sie” etc. However, I suspect once you actually get to conversational level it’s going to feel weird. How often would you say something like “we’ve got new neighbours, she’s a travel agent and he’s a builder”? Am I going to have to replace “he” and “she” with “the man” and “the woman”? We’ll see. I mean, I don’t really have plans to get that far with the language learning but maybe it’ll all be perfectly sensible when/if I get there.
(It’s useful for strange dogs – not that I say it out loud because it’s weird to live in Wessex and comment on strangers’ dogs in Finnish but I can say “hän on kiltti koira!” without any of the awkward English “he… she?… it? such a good dog, anyway”)
- Speaking of “the man”, Finnish doesn’t use articles
No “a”, no “the”. Norwegian uses suffixes to achieve definite articles (hund = dog, hunden = the dog, hundene = the dogs) but I don’t think Finnish does. I opened my course book when it first arrived and I think the grammatical structure around articles still exists but the articles themselves are, at best, implied. At the moment, it’s easy enough to not think about it. “Dog is nice”, “Norwegian cat is Viking” and so on (these are some sentences I’ve been learning, so thanks Duolingo!) are fine. It’s one less thing to learn.
- Adjective-noun order is the same as in English
After eleven years of learning French and having “the cat blue” drummed into my head (except, as ever, there are exceptions and they’re really annoying), it feels like I’m cheating in Norwegian and Finnish when it’s “the blue cat”. Or “beautiful country” or whatever adjective-noun pair I’m being taught. Sininen kissa. Kaunis maa. Vanha kantele. It feels like a literal translation and I’ve been well and truly taught not to do that. But in this case, it’s what’s correct and it’s what’s done and again, it makes it easy for me. I’m enjoying it because my peeks at the course book and the grammar book tell me that Finnish has some hell in store for me further down the line so I’m taking my easy little victories where I can.
- “To be” and “to be?” are different words
Duolingo didn’t explain this and let me figure it out for myself. I’ve been dealing with just “to be”, so I was accustomed to “I am”, “you are” and “he/she is”. The next module introduced “we/you (plural)/they” and then suddenly they changed and I had to go to Google Translate to discover that while “I am” might be “olen”, “am I?” is “olenko?”. Olet/oletko. On/onko. Olemme/olemmeko. Olette/oletteko. Ovat/ovatko. I’ve not got much further with verbs yet but I suspect the -ko suffix to turn a verb into a question is something I’m going to have to get used to. I’ve never encountered anything like that before so right now that’s an interesting novelty rather than a difficulty.
- “Snake” is “käärme”
Excuse my Anglocentrism but a snake has to begin with S, or at least contain a hiss. I cannot reconcile a slithery scaly hissy creature with a sharp K-sound and a long A. Also, it’s going to be a while before I really get used to the aforementioned “cat” being “kissa”.
- Using the Finnish keyboard throws up issues
I installed the Finnish keyboard on my phone because so many vowels have accents and long-pressing to get to ä and ö all the time was annoying. The trouble is that installing the keyboard also brought autocorrect, which is something you don’t want when you’re learning. I’m happy for it to correct genuine typos, like all the times I aim for a and hit s by accident but it doesn’t help me learn when it notices I still haven’t figured out which letter is the double (at first it was always the one I didn’t expect. Now my expectations are so twisted that I have no idea what looks weird anymore). But if I uninstall it, I’m back to spending ten minutes on the accents every time Väinö or Mr & Mrs Pöllönen show up.
- There are so many double letters and it’s usually not the one you expect
One I’ve been wrestling with lately is “teacher” – “opettaja”. My instinct is that it should be double-p single-t but it’s not. “Kiltti” as in the good dog a couple of paragraphs up – I can only spell that because I want to put double-l which means it’s single-l and double-t. If in doubt, double up the letter you don’t think it is. And if in doubt, double the Ts. I don’t think there’s any system to it – languages are too big and too old and too convoluted for many of them to have consistent systems – but that seems to work at this early stage.
- And finally, I don’t seem to know any of the basics
Yes, I’ve criticised Duolingo before. I’ve seen people do it daily for months or even years, even complete a course, and claim to be utterly unable to hold even a basic conversation. And here I am, a month in, and I still don’t know yes or no.
I’m going to keep going until I feel like I’m at an acceptable level of Tourist Finnish (can read my way around a city, a railway station and a menu) but unless anyone’s really keen, I won’t do any more updates, except a mention of my progress in my 2021 roundup on December 30th.
Damn, I don’t know how to say bye! either.