Hello, Finns. I am a Polish trying to learn the Finnish language. Are there any tips that i should know or any ways to make learning the language easier/more fun?

21 comments

  1. I don’t know anything which makes it easier, but I know that Polish speakers have great difficulty in distinguishing ‘e’ and ‘ä’, and short and long vowels. So pay special attention to those and I wish you success.

  5. Try to learn spoken and formal language somewhat simultaneously. Especially if you plan to have conversations with Finns. It also helps you to connect the formal words with their casual forms like ‘Minä’ = ‘Mää’, ‘Mä’, ‘Mie’, ‘Miä’, ‘Meikä’, ‘Meitsi’ etc. (Eng. ‘I’).

    Also don’t be afraid of the amount of cases we have. We will understand you. Reading helps a lot with drawing the lines between context and cases so I hope you like to read books.

    Duolingo will help you get started but it makes mistakes and it only teaches basics.

    For Polish, Finnish pronounciation might differ much and cause some difficulties at first. Still, you will most likely be understood.

  6. If you live in Finland try Adult education center classes, high quality for a cheap price. In helsinki you can find them in ilmonet.fi
    You can find a lot of classes also online ones in finnishcourses.fi too. Personal experience that it was a lot faster than apps, self learning, etc.

    Learning a new language takes a lot of courage but it’s also fun and cool, good luck!

  9. Honestly? Best practise happens with a native.

    Which can be hard if you don’t have one at hand….

    But try to immerse in the language. If you can, while watching movies or other media, try to have Finnish subtitles and polish audio or vice versa. That helps learning the occasional sentence, perhaps even figure out how sentence structure works.

    If you feel confident and already gave grasp of the language, comes over to r/Suomi to test your skills. We don’t bite (almost never).

    And in the end… Book Finnish (standard issue Finnish) only works one way. No Finn in reality speaks book Finnish so learning at least one dialect opens more doors.

  10. I would try to watch some children’s movies and cartoon series (with subtitles if needed), the visuals and simple language can help a lot. Choose something that actually interests you a bit so that it’s more fun to learn 🙂 It can be a good idea to choose a bit older movie/series since there can be some confusing/trendy slang vocabulary in the newer ones. (But that is just my observation)

    I would also try to look for Finnish friends, so you can practice Finnish while doing something fun together, for example playing games

    Dualingo seems like a good idea but I have heard bad things about it. It can be confusing and cause a lot of questions, and the app doesn’t really explain why the language works the way it does 😀

  11. Good luck man. It’s not the friendliest of languages but it is also not weird in it’s pronounciations just learn proper way before paying any attention to any dialects of ours.

  15. I would…

    1. Go back and learn about your Verbs, Adjectives, Constants etc before starting. You will need these going forward when you start Finnish. I myself hadn’t done any Adult learning or anything in regards to language so I had to relearn these in English before starting.
    2. Learn the Finnish alphabet by heart
    3. Counting 1,2,3,4,5 then months in Finnish
    4. Verb rules are usually the first to start with.
    5. Books, TV, Radio, YT, everything to adsord it.
    6. Tutors, classes, online

    Has a steep learning curve and will take some time to learn so don’t worry if you don’t get something very quickly.

  17. A lot of our words have their origins in very basic verbs.

    Tie: a road.

    Tietää: to know

    Tieto: a knowledge

    Tietäjä: an augur, shaman etc

    Tietokone: a computer (in older Finnish, kone meant “knowledge” so this basically means knowledge know)

    A special class could be made about words related to the person in an intimate way, as we had two to three different classes for soul.

    Itse: self. This was the “rational, me soul”. From here we get a ton of compounds such as

    – Itsepäinen: Stubborn

    – Itsekäs: Selfish

    – Itsenäinen: self-sufficient

    ​

    ​

    Mieli: mind. This was the experiencing soul that imparted emotion.

    – Mielitietty: favorite

    – Mielekäs: interesting, motivating

    – Mieletön: Groovy, cool, awesome

    – Mielistellä: To kiss ass

    And so on. There are a ton of words derived from just these three. Just pay attention: if there’s a tie-, meili-, or itse- as the first component of any compound it’s very probably one of these.

  18. Learn the phrase full of respect and love towards one of our most excellent neighbours and warmest friends.

    *Ryssä on ryssä vaikka voissa paistaisi.*

    /s

  19. We hawe leters äö live them last best way to Lars Finnish IS to tolk whit Finnish pepole we all SPEK english Finnish pepole a polite and cwajet we lissen
    When you haw somting to say.

  21. One of my foreign friends used to watch kids tv-shows, cartoons etc. Language is little bit simplified and Basic so it was easier to catch on. He liked specially the nineties Moomin stories. And he learned it pretty fast. 🤷‍♂️

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