Hauskalainen

Wikibooks:Babel

en-N	This user can read and write at a native level in English.

fi-2	Tämä käyttäjä osaa lukea ja kirjoittaa suomea keskitasolla.

About Me

I am a British student studying Finnish in Finland.

I am helping to write learning material for foreigners learning Finnish.

My useful links

Books I am editing

http://fi.wikibooks.org/wiki/Suomen_kieli_ulkomaalaisille

http://fi.wikibooks.org/wiki/Suomen_kieli_käyttöön

And also the versions in translation in the English wikibooks library.

Reminders for myself

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Hyark May be good to contact this guy!

Scraps for later edit/insert

TIP These changes that occur in verbs are fairly regular and may seem inconsistent (which is how it looks when the verbs are divided in to six types, each type then having separate rules to remember). Hopefully, by learning the construtional needs of Finnish and a little more about consonant effects (especially the sticky nature of letters like L N R and S), will re helpful the phonic reasons why the verbs seem to behave differently and this may (a) help you to learn faster and (b) think about Finnish as Finns do.

TIP When learning a verb, do not just learn the dictionary form. Think about how you are (a) most likely to hear and how (b) you yourself are most likely to use that word. Write down and practise using the word in their context and in their correct form. Check the right form of the word using a dictionary that has all the main conjugations or using an on-line conjugator such as that at Verbix.com or being careful by following the verb type examples in this book, being very careful to check to see if there are consonant gradation effects in the examples that may apply to the verb you are about to use. Finally, verify usage in a dictionary, or nowadays just as good, using Google.

So for example you are tempted to buy something so you set out to learn the word meaning to tempt and discover from your dictionary that it is houkutella. If you just learn houkutella but what you are most likey to want to say I am tempted to buy it you are most likely to end up saying "houkutellan ostaa sen" or even if you remembered that lla verbs have stems ending e then perhaps "houkutelen ostaa sen". But both are in fact incorrect. You could find out by checking the conjugation at verbix.com. The stem form of houkutella is in fact houkuttele, the t being held a little longer than in the infinitive form. The reason for this is explained above. So you may feel that what you need to say is houkuttelen ostaa I am tempted to buy. You do a search on Google for houkuttelen and discover it has 1,430 entries. This is a bit of a surprise ... you expect houkuttelen to come back with rather more entries!! You do another search on the string "houkuttelen ostaa" (the " " characters tie the word combination together) and you are astounded to discover that nowhere on the internet is this word combination found! (Maybe after Google has found this page it will appear for you!). If you think about it, what you have learned to say is the transitive verb "I will tempt" rather than the reflextive verb "to be tempted"... but you still cannot find that in the dictionary! How does one get around this dilemma without a Finn to help you out? Well with Google try going to www.goggle.fi, select the button for pages in Finnish and type in the search field < "tempted to buy" ostaa>. ...to be continued!!!