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Evita’s TAC 2008 - Finnish | ||
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 17 of 51 23 May 2008 at 7:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Yeah, I remember how hard this lesson was for me...
By the way, as far as I understand the ого/его ending in Russian adjectives is somehow related to the pronoun его, maybe it makes this concept a bit less odd;) at least for me it did. pity I was told about this when I already had this lesson down :/ Good luck!!! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 18 of 51 27 May 2008 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm answering here so that the Finnish thread doesn´t turn into "questions about Finnish" thread :-)
Sort of, yes. Actually the 'genitive' stem can be both strong and weak - e.g. poikansa/pojan. When there's a possessive suffix attached (only in the singular genitive and plural nominative), the stem is strong, otherwise it depends on the case, but mostly weak. Is it clearer this way? By the way, that was exactly one of the points I liked about your edition :D In mine it's not clearly stated that the suffixes are added to the genitive stem, but there are examples that make it clear the consonants are strong in such case... Edited by Serpent on 27 May 2008 at 9:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Wilma Triglot Newbie Zimbabwe Joined 6164 days ago 16 posts - 18 votes Speaks: Finnish*, Swedish, English Studies: Spanish | Message 19 of 51 07 June 2008 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Hei Evita! I have visited Latvia just once, for many many years ago. One thing I remember about my visit is that Latvian language sometimes sounded surprisingly like Finnish (just like you too said about Finnish), and even more surprisingly, some Latvian words were almost identical to Finnish words. And here, in your mail, I saw one more similar word! "Kutina" means in Finnish "itch", "a tickling sensation", "kutittaa" means "to tickle".. Good luck for your studies! Terveisin Wilma Edited by Wilma on 08 June 2008 at 3:41am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6555 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 20 of 51 07 September 2008 at 3:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's September now and my last post was in 24th May so you can probably guess that I lost motivation/had another interests and forgot about Finnish for a while. However, the reason for my wanting to learn Finnish is still there and I still want to do it so I resumed my studies last weekend.
I had left off in lesson 4 which had the Genitive case in it, possessive pronouns/suffixes, some postpositions and a lot of new vocabulary (mostly about family and school). The grammar was difficult or maybe I just got frustrated with myself that I didn't learn it as quickly (with as little effort) as I wanted to. Anyway, I have officially finished lesson 4 now. I didn't do some of the exercises but that's ok, I've decided that I don't need to do all of them in each lesson. I've been reading this forum and many people say that it's important to start speaking as soon as you can even if the grammar is incorrect because language is all about communicating. I've thought about it a lot but I can't make myself do it. I just don't want to do it. One reason is the inner perfectionist in me - I don't want to say it out loud if I know it's incorrect. The second reason - the place where I want to use Finnish when (if) I learn it properly is at work so you see it requires the grammar to be up to scratch and I don't want to get stuck with bad habits. There is one thing I do to learn the language actively, not just passively, and that is Anki cards. All of them are in Latvian, mostly with single words on them, and I try to produce them in Finnish. I hope that when the time comes, when I have sufficient knowledge of grammar and sufficient vocabulary, I hope it will all just click together and I will be able to speak correctly. I plan to read a novel in Finnish in order to get comfortable with the sentence structures, that should help with speaking a lot. Speaking of Anki, I had about 150 cards there in May and of course they were all due when I opened the program. I decided not to do them all at once but spread them out in order to remember them better. I still haven't done all of them, there are about 30 cards left. I had to press 'completely forgot' on 70-80% of the cards but now that I relearned them I think they're going to stick in my head for a long time. I'll start adding new cards when I've finished with the existing ones. I think I wrote about the word 'valitettavasti' in one of my first journal entries here, that I liked the sound of the word. Well, this is a very long word so I was really surprised that I still remembered this word from spring. I must really like it, hehe. So I finished lesson 4 and started lesson 5. It's going to be even harder than lesson 4 - it has 3 new cases, lots of notes about when these cases should be used, a big section on verbs and 3 texts which means a lot of new vocabulary. It confuses me that two of these three texts are at the very beginning of the lesson before the grammar section. I'm starting with grammar and only then doing the texts. I was also thinking during the last week that I really need some audio input. I found this, it's very good for listening but unfortunately I'm not at that level yet, I didn't understand a single word during 10 minutes of speech. Perhaps someone can recommend a site where I could get the same Finnish texts written and spoken? That would be a great help to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6555 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 21 of 51 08 September 2008 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'll start with what I forgot to mention in my previous post. Thank you to everyone who's giving me encouragement and advice, it's always nice to have that.
Now, on to Suomi. Yesterday was Sunday and I spent quite a lot of it (at least by my standards) studying Finnish. I would estimate 4-5 hours including small breaks. I normally sit at the computer when I study because of my Anki cards so there are always a lot of distractions. But yesterday I was able to focus on Finnish so here's what I did: I read or reread all the grammar in lesson 5. Not just read it but also tried to remember it. (Wouldn't it be great if reading something once was enough for us to remember it? It definitely would be great.) It was at least my third time reading about Illatiivi, Essiivi and Elatiivi so I'm starting to remember how to form the endings. But the lesson also featured several verbs and I'm having more difficulties with them right now. I actually know very little Finnish verbs, and before I began this lesson I knew even less, I think I knew only 3 verbs - olla (to be), itkeä (to cry) and maksaa (to cost, to pay). Olla was obviously the first verb I learned, then came itkeä as an example of regular Finnish verbs of group I. (I mean really, 'to cry'? Couldn't they have chosen a more cheerful verb like 'to smile' for example?) The third verb I knew, maksaa, was just because it's very similar to its Latvian counterpart. I think I must have written about it in one of my first blog entries. I'll check it because I definitely can't omit the story of 'maksaa'. So those were the three verbs I knew (although to be fair, I remember reading something about 'singing' and 'dancing'). In comparison, I knew at least a hundred nouns and adjectives. I suppose that's why I have trouble with verbs, I'm not used to them yet. I hope that'll happen soon. After finishing with the grammar I went to the first text at the beginning of the lesson. It was about various rooms in a house. I decided after reading the first sentence that I need to alter my strategy regarding new Anki cards - I still hadn't finished with the old ones but I started to create new ones as I was reading the text. Together with some words left over from lesson 4 I created about 30 new cards. I'll start going through them after I finish writing this. The text was hard for me. Not just because there were a lot of unfamiliar words but also because it made use of the new cases of the lesson and I had to stop at almost every word to analyze why it was in that particular case. But it was worth it. If nothing else, I'm going to remember forever how 'room' is in Finnish (huone for those who don't know). After finishing with the text I didn't want to do anything else anymore, I was tired of Finnish. But I did one more thing on Sunday - I read and listened to this. I was shocked at how fast the woman was speaking, I definitely need to listen to written text more. I plan to do the next parts soon. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 22 of 51 09 September 2008 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm very happy to know you're going on :=) Good luck!
As for audio with accompanying text, I definitely recommend Ymmärrä suomea. I somehow managed to do around 10 lessons of Chernyavskaya without listening to practically any spoken texts but listening to music a lot, and at that point I probably understood songs better than "usual" texts :D In that idiotic situation that site really helped me :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6555 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 23 of 51 10 September 2008 at 11:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Serpent, thanks for the link, it will be very useful. It took me some time to find the audios but I succeeded in the end. I think I will start going through the texts after finishing a couple more lessons in my book.
I didn't feel like doing much on Monday after writing a post for this journal so I just reviewed some Anki cards and that's about it. On Tuesday I had more energy and I discovered that I hadn't finished the first text of lesson 5, there were still 5 sentences left. I couldn't figure out the meaning of one sentence even with the help of dictionary but I'm not too worried about that, it was a very dull text. I looked over the next text and I realized quickly that it's a very useful text and I'm going to study it very much. It's basically all about verbs, like "I get up. I get dressed and go to the kitchen. I eat and listen to the radio. I go to work. The bus comes. I get in the bus." And so on and on. I think I'll make a list of all these verbs on paper somewhere and put the list below my monitor. That'll get my attention. Do you know what's the most hellish Finnish word I've encountered so far for my pronunciation as well as my memory? It's käytännöllinen. I've been trying to memorize it for 3 days now and no success so far, I always have to click "Made a mistake" in my Anki. And do you know what the word means? Practical. How ironic. I did a quick search through my blog and saw no story about 'maksaa' so here it is. The verb means "to pay" and "to cost" and the interesting thing is that there's a verb in Latvian - maksāt - that means exactly the same thing. This fact is amazing by itself but it's not the whole story. There's also the word 'firma' which means "a company" and in Latvian it's the same - 'firma'. So when our Finnish colleagues come to visit us (or the other way around) we usually go to dinner together and it's paid by the company, of course. So the Finns say 'firma maksaa' and the Latvians say 'firma maksā' and it sounds exactly the same! So of course it always gets many laughs from everybody. There have been a couple times where I said this sentence to a Finn who was in Latvia for the first time and didn't know about this phenomenon. Their reactions are always funny. P.S. The browser ate my post the first time I tried to post it so let me tell you I was very glad I'd done a Ctrl+A Ctrl+C before I hit the button. You never know when it might come in handy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sei Diglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 5944 days ago 178 posts - 191 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German, Japanese | Message 24 of 51 10 September 2008 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is for intermediate/advanced students right? I have it saved up from before but since it's all in Finnish, I figured it was for more advanced studying. So, since I'm a beginner, it'd probably not do me any good to try and work through it right?
I don't think I have a whole lot of problems with pronunciation, but long words always get to me. >.< Specially if there are double consonants mixed it (except kk)! It makes it so damn hard to say the word! I really have to listen to it before I can pronounce it.
Happened to me the other day.... but since I was in a hurry(!!), I didn't copy the text like I usually do when it's something bigger than just a few lines... Bad luck got to me, and Internet crashed. Had to retype everything! Was really annoying. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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