FINNISH - PROBABLY THE BEST LANGUAGE IN THE WORLD?
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- čas přidán 12. 10. 2023
- I am a British guy who has been living in Pori on the West coast of Finland for nearly three years. Finnish has a reputation as being a very hard language for foreigners to learn. Is this perception true? In this video, I also explain some of the fundamental differences between Finnish and English.
That pronouncing every letter works the other way around too: if a native Finnish speaker hears a new Finnish word, he/she immediately knows how to write it.
That is the feature of many languages :) for example Czech.
I always say that the fact that English countries have spelling bees says a lot about the language
With few exceptions being loan words
There are some words that can be difficult to Finnish to write, why those are trained in school in hearing lessons. Where teacher say the word twice, and students needs to write it correctly.
It also helps to find if someone has difficulties in hearing, or writing or understanding. So they can get some extra help to get around that problem.
"J.R.R Tolkien took an interest in the Finnish mythology of the Kalevala, a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot. He then became acquainted with the Finnish language, which he found to provide an aesthetically pleasing inspiration for his Elvish language Quenya. Many years later, he wrote: "It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me." and used it to construct Quenya."
Interesting, did not know that
@@nigelwatson2750 Please read "The Letters of Tolkien" book if you want to find out more :)
Im here also because of seeking Quenya sources.
The poetry and myths itself that were compiled into the Kalevala, were thousands, or tens of thousands of years old. These are the creation and origin mythology of the world and Finnish people in Finnish mythology. They had been passed down by speech through all the millenia, and Lönnrot was the first to compile them into a book.
You said Aiti.
You do use Ä-sound in english words like angry (Ängry), sad (Säd) or Hanging (Hänging).
Good point.
Hyvä huomio.
Finnish A is like the a in "far".
Finnish Ä is like the a in "man".
Neither is really any harsher than the other like he claims at 1:15
Cat?
@@jcpana060959yes, cät aswell.
Batman (bätmän).
It's always nice to watch when a foreigner breaks down finnish language.
It gives me a whole new perspective to my language which I have taken for granted all my life.
So thank you very much = Kiitos paljon! or Paljon kiitoksia!
Ole hyvä
I grew up in a Part of Northern Minnesota that had a strong Finnish demographic ( including my family). It even had an effect on the local dialect. It was habitual to drop pronouns from sentences when they were implied. "Went to the store" rather than "I went to the store" etc.
Interesting.
How did you know who went, when english doesn't have "bending" verbs? Or was only the word I dropped, but if it was someone else, "He went to the store", you'd mention who?
@@lyondragons8898 It had to be implied by the context. Such, as "Is Tom home?" "No, went to the store".
truly fascinating!
This is actually common in Finland even today. It is used with he/she (hän) and they (he). In spoken language you would say "Se meni" (it went, meaning he/she went) and you can just drop the "pronoun" (yes, we switch "hän" to "se" literally meaning "it" in spoken language) and also "Ne meni" (they went). The book language would go like "Hän meni" and "He menivät".So if you want to emphasize brevity in your use of words you'd just say "meni".
This was a very nice "Finnish in a nuthshell for English speakers" -video. I am a native Finnish speaker.
Kiitos palijon.
Not sure if it's the best, but it is absolutely THE BEST language for bad language and cussing someone out.
Nice to hear that you appreciate finnish language.
Kiva että arvostat suomen kieltä.
Correction: Kiva kuulla että arvostat suomen kieltä.
@@finman123 ei oo nii tarkkaa
@@finman123 Correction: On kivaa kuulla, että arvostat suomen kieltä.
1: if you say Cät, Car and Cän out loud you will hear the difference between Finnish A and Ä.
2: Double consanant is important so you don't accidentally mix words. When kids are tough to read we use hyphen - to teach reading "ta-vu-ta tul-li, tuu-li ja tu-li." (hyphen customs, wind and fire.) and then you learn to say Tul and you rebeat Tul Tul Tul Tul and then you learn to read Li Li Li Li Li and then you say Tul Li and now you read Tulli right 👍it takes a little time to get used to but once you get it you can just start reading Finnish well.
Tuuli = Wind
Tuli = Fire / Came
Tulli = Customs
Edit. for examples in Mennä at 6:10 he actually says Menä with single N and not double NN. The hardest part is to understand that after you say Men Nä to say Mennä you hold the N between Men and Nä. Basically you hold the N sound after saying Men and then continue with thät position Nä so the tong never resets between the N and sounding the NN trough both hyphens
A small clarification: the dots on Ä and Ö are not umlauts. Umlauts modify the pronunciation of already existing letters. It's a bit confusing because of the look of the letters, but for all intents and purposes, Finnish Ä and Ö are considered wholly separate letters, not modified A and O.
Thanks - you make a good point. ä is a distinctively Finnish letter, as is ö
Just like in Turkish, in Turkish leteers of Ü, Ö, Ş, Ç, Ğ are wholly seperate letters which they have their own keys on the Turkish keyboard.
I wouldn't call them "wholly" separate letters necessarily per say for learning and pronunciation purposes, as "umlaut" means the indication of different vowel quality. Ä and Ö are basically the "nasal" (or whatever it's called) versions of A and O, just like Y is to U (for consistency Finnish, perhaps Y should be Ü, huh? lol). Which typically go together in terms of pronunciation as in työläs (y/ö/ä) or tuolla (u/o/a).
they're not that different, they're essentially the same sounds just in different parts of the mouth: a,o,u are back vowels (pronounced at the back of your mouth) and ä,ö,y are front vowels (pronounced at the front of your mouth)
We just should have "ü" instead of "y" and then you could just have perfect balance, front and back vowels separated by simply umlaut. It is sorta annoying imperfection, having y instead which doesn't really show its relation to u.
Respect sir from a British guy also living in Finland for creating this video. Been here for over 15 years and while I understand enough Finnish to get by I'm terrible at speaking Finnish. Love that you use the term 'bend' when referencing verbs rather than a much more English term such as conjugate as it shows how little time it takes for even changes in how we talk in English to rub off on us.
Few tips I would have, if you want to sound native with spoken Finnish
1. The stress on words are on the first syllable. Example from the video would be you saying poRISsa instead of POrissa.
2. Pay extra attention to double letters. You did get them correct here sometimes (mutta, totta for example), but you also did stumble on them enough times that it's something to be focused on. In the word "olemme" for example, you need to be mindful to pronounce the "m" in the end of second syllable and at the start third syllable (o-lem-me). Also with double vowels (ulkomAAlaiset), but with vowels it's harder to explain in text form other than just to pronounce it longer.
3. Some people have already pointed this out, but Ä/ä is same as A/a in man for example.
4. This one might be a bit out there, but Finnish has something called vowel harmony. [Ä, Ö, Y] are front vowels, [A, O, U] are back vowels and [E, I] are neutral. A Finnish word can only have neutral vowels and either front vowels (formed at the front of the mouth) or back vowels (formed at the back of the mouth), which determines what vowels are used in 'bending' or conjugation. For speaking Finnish this is also important because of what I would call a "relaxed mouth posture". Since you don't need to be prepared to form vowels from different parts of the mouth within a single word, you can keep your mouth posture more relaxed, which does impact the overall sound of a native speaker.
5. Im not quite sure about this since there can be a lot of regional variation in it, but to me, mixing more formally used word (kirjakieli, written language) with more spoken words can sound a bit weird. For example I would say either "mä oon" or "minä olen", but never "mä olen" or "minä oon", but im not 100% sure if there is a region in Finland that mixes them. You did say at the end of the video that the examples at the start were supposed to be the formal kind, in which case they definitely should not be mixed. In this case the phrases at the start should have been "Minä olen englantilainen" and "Minun nimeni on Nigel" (or in spoken Finnish, "mä oon..." and "mun nimi on...").
Also I should point out that it's exceedingly rare to hear someone speaking the more formal version of Finnish as you are not really expected to use it usually no matter who you are speaking to. I think you may hear news reporters use it, as well as in prewritten speeches.
6. Finnish uses the rolling "R" sound. It can be really hard to learn even for Finnish kids growing up, so it must be very hard to get as an adult, but you are definitely using the English "R" sound (tapped "R" I think it's called)
Lastly, I would like to say that though I may come across as very pedantic here, my intention here was not to belittle, but rather to provide you with some points that you can improve on.
All good advice. Thanks for your comments.
Kyllä mulle ainakin "mä olen" kuulostaa ihan normaalilta puhekieleltä, vaikka "mä oon" onkin enemmän käytössä. "Minä oon" sen sijaan kuulostaa vähän hassulta. (Oon Helsingistä.)
@@Larjus Ite oon Etelä-Pohjanmaanlta ja asunu kans Tampereella, mutta täytyy kyllä myöntää etten hirveesti tiedä puhekielisyyden maakuntaeroista. Menisin kyllä silti varsinkin kaikille suomen opettelijoille suosittelemaan, että pitää puhekielen ja kirjakielen ihan erillään ainakin alkuun. Mun mielestä "mä olen" kuulostaa kyllä vähän hassulta, mutta ei niin paljoa, että jos muuten puhuu täydellistä suomea, niin en kyllä heti ajattelis että olis ei-äidinkielinen. Mun mielestä kyllä "olen" voi käyttää puhekielessäkin jos sitä haluaa korostaa lauseessa (vähän niin kun englannissa "I'm" vs "I am"), mutta en ainakaan ite ikinä käyttäis muuten.
Your finnish is great! I don't know if it's because of the pronunciation or misunderstanding, but that's not how A and Ä are pronounced and differ. A is a more clear sound that's hard to find in english, similar to U in "sun". Ä on the other hand is very prominent in English, e.g A in "apple".
Thanks. Rolling the R doesn't come natural to native English speakers, either
A useful tip I once noticed myself is that the words _glass_ (lasi) and _hand_ (käsi) have the same A/Ä distinction both in (British) English and in Finnish.
I was born in Finland but moved to Sweden more than 50 years ago. Honest people still ask me if I am from Finland, they can hear it, but somehow I can not. It's a strange thing, I can not hear it myself, even if I know Swedish better than Finnish today.
The accent is very strong like other cultures. I can hear a Finn talk English a mile away, but we all have accents it's just the way life is.
Finnish people who spoke Swedish in their youth as their 1st language very often have a slight accent even after decades of speaking mostly Finnish. I've missed it myself multiple times but after learning about their background it becomes obvious like "oh that's what it was".
When you said that Finnish is a very concise type of language, I began to wonder that perhaps that has something to do with why we have a reputation for being stereotypically silent or a people of few words. It's not something we can recognize that easily ourselves, but it's very interesting to hear what our language is like from a non-native speaker. Very intriguing.
The amount of speech does not really differ from analytic languages. It is not that. The reason is mainly that we are descendants of hermits that lived in harsh environments with arguably very limited amounts of purely non-survival related human contact. I think that would be a more likely explanation for the general introvertism encountered on finnish soil. 😊
@@jormagamer1634 It's the same here in Northern Sweden. Drive 5 minutes west from Tornio and the language is different but the people are just as introverted. It's truly a wonder what freezing temperatures and darkness does to a population.
We also have this very strong culture of "brevity is the soul of wit" way talking. We don't want to jammer on so we try to cram as much meaning into a few words.
It's what you could the poetry of silence.
@@jormagamer1634 Nor has it anything to do with the harsh environment at all. Eastern Finns specifically Karelians are a great example to it.
@@Kyosti5000 I think we just have cultural ADHD or something
I love learning languages, this was really interesting and I want to give it a go! 🇫🇮
Kiva.
Dont do it! Tuut hulluks
Thank you for this video, Nigel! I am about to start learning Finnish.
always nice to have someone trying to learn this weird language of ours. you're pretty good considering how long you have been learning!
I remember reading that Tolkien, a great scholar of languages, had two favourite languages: Welsh and Finnish.
Great video, cheers from Oulu!
Interesting video and these comments were nice to read!
Thank you for this. Starting to learn Finnish and this a good way to start. Kippis!!🙌🏼😊
An important thing to note about puhekieli is that there isnt one puhekieli and it's more a matter of that Finnish is a language of many dialects in the finno-karelian continuum. The aggressive formality of the standard language is both a necessary solution to unify these dialects without favoring a single one too much and also leads to the fact that nobody speaks it day to day. In a different timeline of history there could be several written languages here but instead we've unified somewhat.
Also, counterintuitively Ä is actually the one that sounds like the english A in most cases, like in the word sad, while A sounds more like the A in car or how the british say bath. Though vowels are more of a continuum and there isn't always an exact match in different languages, leading to confusions and weird accents.
Great information, thanks. As I live in Pori, I have come to appreciate the way straignt-talking porilainen speak - they have different words and (amusing) phrases.
Whenever I hear someone casually speak Written Finnish on the streets I become immediately suspicious because for me it raises a kind of a knee reflex of ”what are they trying to hide???”
Just going to nitpick a bit here to point out that "bath" the "British way" depends on what part of England you're in. Go north and that "a" will turn into "ä" real quick.
it's quite interesting that äiti (mother) is a loanword from Germanic languages as words for close family members are rarely loans. the original word for mother was emä, which is still used for a mother of an animal as either emo or emä and there are several words derived from it that are still used as well like emäntä (compare with isäntä).
another thing of note is that in spoken Finnish it's common to hear the passive form of a verb used for the first person plural (we) instead of the proper form for it (me ollaan instead of me olemme). also the term for "bending" verbs is conjugation, but that's not really that important.
Really nice insights, you are quite a bright fella. Finnish is quite hard, but very logical, albeight you understand it.
Loistava video. kiitos!
Always love it when people take interest in our little language!! You're doing an amazing job of speaking it as well as showing the basics. 💪🏻
This is the example I give to people learning Finnish who want to truly get the difference in pronouncing A and Ä. A is like the a in the English word 'car'.
Ä is the a in the English word 'cat'. To us it's a very distinctly different sound :)
Hyvää alkanutta kesää täältä Oulusta!
Kiitos. Oulu on kaunis
I don't know I guess everyone likes their mother tongue but somehow I really like speaking Finnish as my mother tongue although I speak English and that's good too and Spanish but Finnish just sounds so exact and clean to my ear.
The only problem besides it's grammar complexity is that we have the spoken language which is different to the correct "book Finnish"..
The Spoken is just more laid back.. easier to pronounce.
Nice to see someone checking this out 🙂🙏🏼
Great video Nigel, I enjoy all your sharing on Finland , very good.
Many thanks, Marty.
as a finn I find it funny how "Ä" pronounciation gives so much trouble to foreigners.
It's a very natural vowel, kinda what babies cry all the way from birth x)
Äiti
True. It's our first vowel we learn. Not only because the word "äiti" is our first word we learn but because the cry of a baby sounds like the vowel Ä.
I bet you can't pronounce æ and all the different Danish vowels
Muistan kun olin kolmannella luokalla ja aloitimme opiskelemaan englantia. Kaikki tykkäsivät oppia uutta ja jännittävää englannin kieltä, mutta oli tyhmää että englantilaiset ääntävät kirjaimet eritavalla kuin ne kirjoitetaan. Haha, that was your first point on the video but from opposite side of the fence 🤣Good video!
Three years and you nailed all the little details that usually are fairly hard to remember for a non native. And even the pronounciation was amazing! Thank you for appreciating our language!
Kiitos paljon
Great video. You speak finnish quite well👍!
Kiitos palijon.
Very nice! 👍
One could mention that the "A with umlauts" is not A with umlauts in the finish, but it is a totally different letter, Ä. Same as I with sidelines is not E.
God bless you too! Love your video!❤
Kiitos
1:00 I think you got the A vs Ä pronunciation swapped around (If youre just having hard time pronouncing them then don't mind me)
A is like the vowel in "car"
Ä is like the vowel in "stack"
Y is somewhat like the vowel in "crew"
J just sounds like Y in english
O is like the vowel in "strong"
Ö is like the vowel in "turn"
Small corrections "Y" is not the vowel in "Crew" for most English dialects. It's an "I" sound (Like in "Feed") but the lips are rounded like in "U" or "O" same thing with "Ö" it's "E" (Only exist in English as part of a diphthong like in the word "Hey") but with the lips rounded.
Thanks, Nigel. I really enjoyed listening to this and hearing you speak Finnish. All I knew about Finnish is that it's an Uralic language and not Indo European.
Perhaps it compares well with Latin in that it is concise and uses a lot less words to express an idea. But obviously not dead. Also its elegance. The word for 'book language' - is it anyway connected to ecclesiastical usage? It sounded like it when you said it.
Thanks, Gwen
book language is a more formal language and generally used in written texts and government sites and in press conferences and the like. It is not connected to churce or clergy. As far as I know the book language and the grammar was created from combining several dialects, when trying to standardize and create grammar rules for Finnish. That is why the book language can be quite different from the way people talk.
Puhekieli just shows that languages evolve - no doubt there will be some people who say that there are grammatical mistakes in puhekieli. For me, the most important thing is that people speak and express themselves!@@SorbusAucubaria
@@SorbusAucubaria Thanks for your explanation. That makes sense.
Hi I'm a Finn and this was a very good and informative video!
Kiitos
Kiitos paljon 😊
Ole hyvää
Wwe learn something new every day thanks Nigel god bless
And God bless you and yours
Thank you Nigel ! I liked it ! Nothing to correct for an old Finnish speaker .
Kiitos.
My friends mom has lived here like 40 years and her accent is still so distinguishable. Its really easy to notice whether someone has born in Finland or moved here at a very young age.
holy shit! so the fluency barrier is eternal
Being Finnish, I instantly realized my father's new wife wasn't a native speaker upon meeting her, even though she was totally fluent after living in Finland for decades. Even a miniscule difference in pronunciation or an unusual choice of words seems to flare up really hard, even if it ultimately doesn't matter. It's unfortunate and probably the reason some Finnish people prefer to converse in English with the non-fluent. Still, most Finnish people will commend you for learning our little language.
@@hosseinmazaheri118not really, if you come here as a kid or are very good at learning languages you can be fluent. It's the accent that gives you away if you learned as an adult. Even a faint accent will be noticeable to Finns.
Great video! Maybe try setting the camera down so it doesn't shake next time :)
Thanks for the tip
This was a nice introduction to Finnish. Although, you got the pronunciations of A and Ä the wrong way around at the beginning but you did pronounce Ä right later with the word "hän". By the way, when you were talking about that word, I was just thinking about J. Karjalainen's song "Hän". Imagine my surprise when you actually began singing it.
It is funny while all anglosaxians can pronounce "and" correctly, but with the letter "ä" they have difficoulties. The sound is the same tough. Äiti äiti. and and! It's so easy.
Puolalaisilla on sama ongelma.
@@kennethainetdin3401 Ändy änd brändy makes one ängry, män.
a = car, jar, tar, large
ä = that, hat, cat
Nice video Nigel :)
Thanks.
Finnish is a very expressive language, yes. But it also means that sometimes you start a sentence and in the middle of it you realise you're going towards a structure that would sound awkward and clumsy and then you have to rephrase the whole thing.
My tactic is to just speak - most Finns are absolutely ecstatic that I at least try. It's also the best way for me to learn - just speak and don't be shy & worry about grammar mistakes. I make plenty when I speak English, so it's nothing new!
It's true that many mistakes not-native finnish speakers do, sound a little clumsy. But if you only use right words, no matter the order, you'll almost certainly be understood 👍
Probably the reason whhy Finnish is so "pure" is because the written language is not that old. English has way longer history. This was a fun watch! Kiitokset Turusta!
Thanks for sharing your insights on learning Finnish! I studied the language on my own just to try it. It's neat how there is no gender agreement for certain nouns. Where I live in the US, it's common to study the Latin languages( Spanish, French and Italian). Certain nouns are male or female. Besides the essential rules to be learned, a proper rhythm or flow helps with speaking these languages.
You pointed out how each letter in Finnish is spoken. I remember it mentioned that Finnish is a phonetic language. It's interesting how the double consonants change the meaning of words as well!
At any rate, Jumala siunatkoon sinua ja perhettäsi.
Kiitos ja Jumala siunatkoon sinua ja sinun
Your pronunciation is pretty good.
Your pronunciation is incredible. Very impressed. I am a German, Swiss, Finnish native and I realized that both German and Finnish suffer a lot from the same MAJOR issue that no one mentions: Practicing it is insanely hard because the natives mostly just speak English back, which must be extremely infuriating. I studied Japanese to fluency and on holiday there often people reacted with extreme relief and instantly kept BOMBARDING me with fast Japanese for the most part. Hardly anyone ever tried to speak English once I said Japanese was fine, which was super nice and I still learned a few new things on a short holiday. But I hear often the opposite story in European countries
In Pori, most people speak Finnish, which is quite right!
@@nigelwatson2750 Awesome to hear!
8:55 That is something that drives me insane with English regularly. I am trying to say or write something nuanced and specific and it's a real battle of itself to just get the idea expressed properly and then after that you notice that the other person either stopped trying to follow it or was unable to once you've finished. Specially with stuff with multiple dependencies.
Of cource it's going to cause some headache for someone speaking totally different kind of language because the fundamentals are very different. As you said there is a solid foundation to the language and very little exceptions. Your video was a refresing take on the matter.
Kiitos
Puhun suomea äidinkielenäni ja toivon sinulle kaikkea hyvää. Jatka ankaraa harjoittelua ja kiitos videosta Nigel! Puhe sujuu kuin tanssi jo nytkin.😂
06:03: "Olen Porilainen": It's actually spelled with a lower case "p": "Olen porilainen". I don't know the official reasoning/explanation for it, but how I understand it is that while "Pori" is a name (proper noun) of a city, "porilainen" is nobody's name or no place's name, so it's spelled with a lower case "p".
And with languages: Englanti = England (the country in UK); englanti = English (the language). So languages are lower cased.
Btw. I live in Pori, too. That said, I'm not "porilainen", I've moved here from elsewhere in Finland. :)
Cheers for learning finnish as well as you do! I can't help but point out, that once you get further, things might not be as clear and concise as you politely praised. 😅 In fact, finnish is full of double or triple (or more) meanings for the same word or sentence. It's ripe grounds for humour, of which there is lots... Things like Fingerpori and such. The thing that makes it (usually) understandable though, is the context where it's used. Mix that up, and expect hilarious results.😅
You have a very good pronounciation of words. I was quite impressed by your pronounciation (of course taking in count that your originally not from finland) Very good, keep it up!
Jatka samaan malliin!
Very good video, you speak finnish nicely
Kiitos.
'Hän' encompassing both 'he' and 'she' is less of a cultural thing and more Finnish being a genderless language. Estonian and Hungarian, both being related to finish (the latter quite a bit more distantly), also have this same feature. The only place in Finnish where gender somewhat appears is in profession names: 'tarjoilija' (waiter), 'tarjoilijatar' (waitress), 'näyttelijä' (actor), 'näyttelijätär' (actress), etc. But these days the "masculine" form is commonly used for both men and women, the "feminine" form is only really used for emphasis, or in some specific cases where the distinction matters, like 'kuningas' (king) vs 'kuningatar' (queen). I have a feeling this is mainly an issue with loanwords ('kuningas' being borrowed from Swedish 'kung' or 'konung' or whatever their archaic form was), but I haven't looked into this enough to say for sure.
Thanks for your comment; it was very informative
"Kuningas" is a loan word from Proto-Germanic so it's more or less "prehistoric" from our point of view. That loan word doesn't come from present day Sweden but earlier from Proto-Germanic speaking traders and or immigrants. Time period for this could have been as early as bronze age.
That's now that the author said though. He said that the fact that the language has both he and she combined to one word, led to the development of the culture to where it is now. That was his hypothesis.
The thing about vovels is that there are front and back vovels. Front vovels being a, o and u while back vovels being ä, ö and y.
Yup you're totally right on saying that finnish is really logical language. Hard of course to start for foreigners.
I found also that Finnish words in a small sentence can be in any order and that sentence gets almost always sensible meaning changing the emphasis. One American translator told me that those Finnish noun cases are almost absolutely logical.
Thank you for an interesting and entertaining video! You pronounce your diftongs beautifully. And once one realizes that Finnish is ment to speak "fluently" ie there is no acrobaty for the tongue, the pronouncing starts to feel a lot easier.
Thank you! 😃
1:41 J Karjalainen is clever way to remember how to say letter J, in Finnish :D 👍
good video
Thanks
Your kitchen has very similar layout as my parents and it's tripping me out. The window is in the same place, the stove is in the same place, the sink is in the same place, the cabinets are similar (almost even the same color!) What's different tho is that were the microwave is there's fridge
No niin. Selvää.
I've found Finnish one of the easier languages to learn, especially when looking at grammar.
Finnish has quite a bunch of rules, but relatively few exceptions. This makes it easy to learn in the long run. Once you learn a rule you can be confident it will hold up in most cases.
In contrast English for instance has comparatively few rules, but a huge amount of exceptions and extra things to learn.
One way to put it: English is easy to get started with, but hard to master. Finnish has a steeper learning curve, but is in the end easier.
I have to disagree with that one.
All though finnish doesn’t have many exceptions when it comes to grammar there are just so many rules that you can always spot a non-native speaker.
You can take a simple word like ”koira” (dog) and there are peobably over a thousand different ways to bend the word.
Even some bilingual people who have spoken finnish along with some other language for their whole life sometimes ahve trouble with the grammar.
I have never heard anyone speak fluent finnish if they werent raised in finland. You can always tell the difference between native and non-native speakers even if the person has lived here for 20 years.
I think it has something to do with the fact that written finnish is so different from the spoken one.
Many rules of the language are just thrown out of the window in out every day spoken language.
Even though like you said finnish does not have many grammatical exceptions that only applies to formal finnish.
English on the other hand seems quite easy to me. I don’t think I have ever really studied it. As a kid I started to watch a lot of english youtubers and learned more and more. Eventually I started to watch movies and shows with english subtitles instead of finnish ones. Nowadays I pretty much use english for everything except my day to day communication IRL.
I feel like there are a lot of fluent non-native english speakers. The same can’t be said about finnish in my opinion.
(And yes, I probably make a lot of small grammatical mistakes in english. Im not saying that my english is close to native. Just saying there are a lot of people who are indistinguishable from native speakers)
@@mirzu42 Ah yes, I was specifically talking about formal Finnish. I started learning the language as a young adult, after having learned English, French and German aside of my mother tongue Dutch. I majored in Finnish, studying it in Dutch and Finnish universities.
Based on the experience I still hold that learning Finnish was easier. Exactly because of the rules. Sure it took a longer time, but my Finnish is stronger and better than English, although I have been using English for much longer than Finnish. I use them both daily, as I still do Dutch.
Anyway, I agree with the video in that the language is concise in that information is encoded in the words. And I find the Finnish language much more expressive than the other languages in my toolbox.
Spoken Finnish, after having learned first formal Finnish was easy to adapt to.
I agree.
The A vs Ä difference is easy when comparing how "mad" and "car" are usually pronounced in english. Haven't thought of a similar example for Ö, but I'm sure there is some french loan word or something that could make it clear. Maybe Finnish J is like the english Y when it's used as a consonant like in "you", but not like "my" where it is a vowel. Y is always a consonant in finnish and there is no equivalent of the english J. Languages are described as triangles with a pointy end pointing up or down to signify how much you need to learn to be able to use it. English requires very little vocabulary and grammar to use it in simple ways while finnish needs a massive base after which things get easier while complex english requires a lot past the tourist phrases part.
I find Finnish fascinating. I would like to learn it some day...
As a Finn, ancient words like elokuu are fascinating. Means August, but could be translated as harvest moon.
@Nigel Watson do you know why Porilaiset add salt to ships ? Pan Suola
His English is very British and beautiful.
Thanks
It’s super intersting as a native Finnish speaker to hear an englishman evaluate the language like this. Sounds complicated indeed but the truth is that finnish is a quite forgiving language. You don’t need to speak it correctly to be understood correctly anyways. Though one hears that it was not perfect you still almost always get the meaning right. Btw sun suomi on loistavaa! 👍🏻
Kiitos, kiitos!
As a native Finnish speaker, I have to say that even though Finnish pronounciation is pretty logical (no silent letters and letter voices are nearly same every time), the inflection forms are just a mess of historical mishaps. For example, words susi (wolf) and lasi (glass): both have two syllables su-si and la-si and both have identical second syllable. However, even the genetive form for this words differs a lot: suden vs lasin. The ending "-n" for the genetive form is expected but here did that "d" come from in "suden"? It's a historical style that's used for the word wolf because it's older word than lasi! So you have to basically remember which words have similar inflection forms and the older the word is, the more complex letter substitutions it will have.
Then there are words that are written identically but pronounced different! For example, word "hauista" is pronounced as "ha-uis-ta" if its refers to search results but "hau-is-ta" if it's meaning is northern pike or biceps!
Thanks for your informative comment - Finns are very cool people; and also HIGHLY intelligent
As a native Finn, I absolutely don't pronounce "hauista" any different whether I'm referring to the fish or the muscle, and certainly not the way you claimed. I've never heard anyone say "ha-uis-ta". You can usually just tell them apart by context. If someone says "treenasin eilen hauista" you can quite safely assume that they did not train anything out of a northern pike.
@@franciswall Yes, the fish and muscle are pronounced the same but "hauista" with the meaning "of searches" has different pronounciation. For example, "En löytänyt ruokalistaa netistä useista hauista huolimatta."
@@MikkoRantalainen Right, my bad, I read that wrong!
There are some propositions in Finnish but they are rare - postpositions and cases are more common (historically cases are merged postpositions). An example of a preposition is "ilman" (without).
"Ilman" at least can be expressed with postposition. "Ilman kirjaa" vs "kirjatta", both meaning "without a book". It is fairly rare in spoken language, of course.
How I always like to explain the difference between A and Ä to English speakers is that A is the sound you start the word ”under” with, and Ä is the sound at the start of ”apple”.
Only some English accents would pronounce ‘under’ as if it was spelt with a Finnish A. Cockney and upper class accents for example, pronounce it ‘ander’. North, west and Scotland it’s pronounced Under.
If we're comparing: English is a language with relatively few rules which have a zillion exceptions.
Finnish is a language with a zillion rules and very few exceptions.
That's my impression
ä is the exact vowel from "black" and "cat"
Bending verbs in personal form is common in many other languages, for instance Portuguese and French.
It’s a bit wrong to say that Finnish would be an easy language for its good match with pronouncing and writing letters the same way. Because the grammar and the bending are complicated, however.
I was once with my Swedish friend in Turku and as a Finnish guy wanted to speak with him, but the only sentence in Finnish he could say was however: I don’t speak Finnish. But he said it’s so fluently that he wasn’t believed.
You live in Pori, what is your experience and opinion about Rauma and their language?
I'm supposed to dislike Raumalainen. I liked their ice-hockey stadium, though.
Finnish has at least one preposition: "ennen" (before). There are some postpositions (that are prepositions in English), such as "jälkeen" (after) or "alla" (under). So, Finnish isn't utterly free of this grammatical structure more common in Indo-European languages.
There’s another: yli=over that can be used both ways: yli vuorten or vuorten yli (=over the mountains)👍
ilman@@ristovirtanen6396
@@ristovirtanen6396 This is true for all these following words (yli, yllä, ali, alla), isn't it? They could be placed either as prepositions or postpositions, some sound overly "poetic" but are possible. EDIT: and now that I think about it, ylle, yltä, alle, alta.
If I remember right, Finnish is one of the oldest languages still spoken. There are also some cool loan words like ""kuningas" (from the old Gothic language: "kuningaz" = a king)
Finnish is one of the oldest languages spoken. It is also incredibly pure & beautiful.
It is interesting how unchanged many Finnish words are from their Proto-Uralic counterparts. If I recall correctly, the word apple (omena) is one of those completely unchanged words.
One thing you can do to sound more fluent in finnish is learning how to pronounce the letter y. A very common thing i see among english-speaking finnish learners is that the letter y sounds more like a u, which i also noticed from this video. Try to learn how to use y correctly, trust me once you figure it out your finnish will sound alot more professional :D
Based on your English accent, I'd venture to guess that you're from Northern England. Other than typically northern vowels, I'm not picking up on clear indications as to where exactly as far as I could tell. Perhaps you don't have a particularly strong local accent to begin with and it's a pretty area of the country where the vowels are recognisably northern.
What resources did you use to learn Finnish, and which ones would you recommend for someone who wants to start?
"r" is pronounced rolling. When you said "me menemme Poriin" should be pronounced with the rolling R. But I am just nitpicking. Interesting video.
There might be only a few non-phonetic words in Finnish language. The ones I'm aware of: "signaali" and "magneetti". Also "hääyöaie" might have some glottal stops between vowels. Also "kenkä", "hanko", "panko", "sanko", "ranka", "sanka", "lanka", "englanti" etc. might not be 100% phonetic as they also use the ŋ sound.
I'm fascinated by words which are both in English and in Finnish languages, like "alas", "kudos", "helmet" (in Finnish they mean "down", "tissue", "pearls")
Helmi - pearl. Helmet - pearls plural - Like Koira - dog and Koirat - dogs
Your Finnish is amazing
Kiitos, onko suomalainen?
I had a foreign friend and he was amazed how 5 year old kids can speak the very difficult language while he couldn't understand a word 😂
Same as Latin language, no silent letters and you pronounce every vowel separately, which is hard for English speakers.
Japanese and Greek and Spanish have a lot common in that matter, that you they usually pronounce all the letters, well spanish not so much but Japanese at least.
Eppu Normaali's Yöjuttu use the difficult vowels beautifully.
Thanks for the information - I like Eppu Normaali - got one of his CDs
Nice job, but some remarks: Your Finnish /ä/ was a bit off, sort of a middle sound which was not distinctly one or the other ("äiti" -- there is not only an /ä/ but a diphthong /äi/ -- you replaced it with the nearest equivalent in your native language). Finnish is ripe with diphthongs and triphthongs. Obviously, it is about the phoneme areas in your native variant of English that you fall back on. Perhaps if you tried to pronounce English with a British conservative (nowadays considered "posh") Received Pronunciation with its /æ/ sound it would make the phonemic distinction between /a/ and /ä/ clearer: that man can (now try to pronounce those words as a "posh" Englishman or as an American). Not that what you said was not understandable in its context, just recommending you eliminate the "bing! wrong!"-alarm in a Finn's phonemic sense. (There may be parts of Finland like Pori where the distinction is not that clear, /ä/ being realised in more or less -- to my ear -- as a middle sound between /a/ and /ä/. It may even be gaining ground, not unlike British RP in recent decades, maybe mid-70s onwards. I'm from Jyväskylä born and bred and find it slightly jarring, somehow off or wrong. It has nothing to do with what things about pronunciation have to do in the UK: class, status, class society etc.) I know this may be difficult for an English speaker as it is all about the so-called (native) phoneme areas that people distinguish between sounds by. These are fixed at a young age. Similarly, it may be -- and actually is -- very difficult for a Finn to distinguish between the English "i-sounds" where it is not just about quantity (length) but about sound quality: did -- deed, ship -- sheep, sit -- seat, hid -- heed etc. -- Another tip: always keep the stress on the first syllable: not Poríin, but Póriin. It may sound odd or unnatural for an English speaker but that is the basic rule in Finnish, and does make you sound much "less-foreign".
Thanks for the tips
For J.Karjalainen and Häntrythis song from way back.
czcams.com/video/W4jPEBQV8zw/video.html
And then there was Minister Ahti Karjalainen who told his age and his wifes age like this - "I am dirty and my wife is dirty too.
And there is Tankerous love too here.
czcams.com/video/J_puoUupeUQ/video.html
PS. if you look for howto pronounce Ä try "and" and the there is the town Harwike of course.
Not sure about the spelling as it has nothing to do with the pronounciating.
I like your way to explain the language and I will return with some thoughts.
Yea puhekieli and murre. Mä, mie, miä, mää. You can tell where someone is from based on what they say.
Is rain wet??
remember u in finnish is always an o sound. well at least a swedish o, though the english one is slightly different, but I noticed that when you pronounced Juhannus
Thanks for the tip.
What you didn't mention is that in finnish the emphasis of the word is always, ALWAYS in the first syllable of the word. In english you pronounce baNAna, but in finnish you say BAnaani.
For compound words the emphasis is always on the first syllable of each word the compound word is compounded from. For example lehti means leaf, where you pronouce it like LEHti. Leafblower is LEHtiPUhallin (english also seem to have compound words😉).
And also a big thing in finnish is that even though some letters are pronounced differently from english, every letter is only ever pronounced one way. It doesn't matter what letters are before or after it, S is always S and K is always K. Even though you might have never heard a word spoken, if you see something written you know how to pronouce it. And similarily if you hear a word you know exactly how to write it down. An exeption to this is loan words from other languages (mostly new english words) which might have most of it's english spelling and pronaunciation.
In all aspects finnish is very consistent. There is very few exeptions, and those exeptions are usually made pretty clear, since there is so few of those.
More consitency is that those endings of words indicating relation is always the same. There are a lot more of them than in english, but once you learn like 9 of the most common ones you are good to go, you will be understud. And at that point you have unlocked the whole language.
Also since finnish is so expressive language, even if you've never heard a word, you might still guess the meaning. It's also pretty easy to make up new words, since all the consistent rules apply, and the parts of which the word consists of usually have hints of the meaning in them.
All in all, finnish is much easier language to learn than english for someone who doesn't speak either language (or other languages of the same language groups) before. For example if you speak some Asian or African languages. Finnish is only hard for english speakers, since it's different. English speakers have easier time learning other languages of the same language group, such as german or swedish.
Correct. Point taken
I've read that Latin is quite popular in Finland (relatively), some suggest that the declensions don't deter Finns or they like an Indo-European language that has that feature in buckets.
Latin? Never heard about this. I'd say latin is propably a novelty language practiced by only few. It has no practical value in Finland and never heard anyone studying that. Unless it was part of some other studies.
I wouldn't all it popular or common. We don't learn it in school like they do in many countries in continental Europe. Maybe the misconception comes from the fact that there used to be a radio show (Nuntii Latini) hosted in Latin in Finland.
1:02 is avain. So it is pronounced here exactly the opposite, actually exactly like ä. A and ä are easy for English speakers.
A is like u in cut and Ä is like a in cat. Precisely. Blessings.