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10000 Finnish Sentences | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5092 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 1 of 5 03 October 2012 at 3:18am | IP Logged |
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Hi everyone! It's been a while since I've been active here, but I plan to change that.
I've just recently started a language learning blog for my own accountability, and I wanted to share it with everyone here. Anyway, here it is! http://10000finnishsentences.wordpress.com/ EDIT: That was just a quick post because I was short on time. Basically, I'm restarting my Finnish studies, and I'm using this blog as a tool to make sure I stay on track. I don't have a set time period or anything, but my goal is 10000 sentences! I want to share this log with the community here, as this place has definitely helped me in the past, particularly when I was just getting started in self-study. I'll post each entry here in its entirety, with the link to the blog posting if anyone would care to check it out there. Here are my first 3 posts: OCTOBER 2, 2012 Hitting Reset – Katu Hi there, My name is Luke. This blog is about my language learning journey in the Finnish language. In this blog, I will track my progress in a number of different ways, particularly though sentences and words. To be a little less vague, I will be tracking the number of sentences I’ve written into a little book I have (which I will simultaneously enter into an SRS program – I’ll touch on that later), as well as the number of words that I “know” based on those sentences. Now, a little bit of background. I’ve studied Finnish for well over 5 years now. I’m not new to the language, and I could probably write this post in (slightly incorrect but readable) Finnish if I really tried. However, in the last year, I’ve stalled. I’ve made little to no progress, and my skills have deteriorated considerably based on that fact. For the most part, that’s been due to me trying to do too much at once. I’ll spare you the details, for now, but I had a very detailed system set up, and all I really had to do was follow it. However, I attempted to do too much, and I soon got overwhelmed by the amount of work that I had set up for myself. I may go into more detail about this another time, but for now, I’ll go into what I’m trying to do here. Essentially my goal is to reach the magic number of 10000 sentences, which is considered by some in the language learning community to be a critical point by which fluency is almost guaranteed to be achieved. To clarify, this would essentially just be reading/writing fluency, because conversational fluency (speaking/listening) is theoretically a very different skill, and one can be a fluent reader and writer while not being able to carry out a lengthy conversation (although someone who can read a very large novel cover to cover can usually at least talk about the weather). For another point of clarification, the 10000 sentences method implies complete and total understanding in all sentences used for that number. That means full understanding of not only all words, but all grammar, as well as idiomatic meanings where appropriate (something that usually occurs over time rather than right at the first contact with the sentence). However, with that in mind, in theory once one knows 10000 sentences of a particular language, they are essentially fluent. This is not the first time I’ve attempted the 10000 sentences, but I’m not including my progress from old attempts here. That is really the point of this blog: I’m hitting reset, and tracking my progress like I was just starting today. However, what’s nice is that I already have a lot of the boring work done for me, or more to the point, I’ve done all the work already. I’m referring to the database of sentences and words that I’ve accumulated and meticulously cataloged through a method called sentence mining (I’ll discuss that as well at a future date) into a lovely program called Anki, which gives me daily reviews of the words and sentences I’ve plugged into the program. My problem is that I was trying to go through too many reviews per day, because I had let it sit for so long that I had thousands of words to review, and I had essentially forgotten most of them. Same went for the sentences. Although I could probably understand them, I was glossing over them. My solution was to reset each database so that everything was essentially brand new. And now, I’m starting fresh. My method as it stands right now is that I’m going through an English language Finnish grammar, complete with a number of context independent examples in Finnish for various concepts. This is partially as a refresher course, and partially as a source of easy sentences to start me off. I write each complete sentence (it can’t be a fragment) into my notebook, then I enter the sentence into Anki, which is kind enough to tell me if I’ve entered the sentence in before. If I’ve done so, I simply activate that sentence, and it shows up for review. If not, I add the sentence to the database, and then it is available for review immediately. Then, for each word in this sentence, I plug each new word into a separate database, which also kindly alerts me to duplicates, and I add the words for review in the same fashion. But here’s the thing: I’m considering every word a “new” word. See, the way I’m doing this, is I’m throwing all prior knowledge of Finnish out the window, at least in terms of my actual progress and ability to that effect. So, at the time of this writing, I’ve actually only entered a single sentence in using this method (mostly just to test things out), consisting of 3 words. This sentence is “Kadulla on auto,” meaning (very roughly) “There is a car on the street”. Therefore, I know the words “katu,” – street – “olla,” – to be – and “auto,” – car – and it is the only sentence I know. In theory. After every post I will update the tally of words and sentences, both at the end of the post and in the sidebar to the right. These are both equally important, with the words being a measure of my individual vocabulary, and the sentences being the progress towards my end goal. Now, most posts will not be this long, or as explanatory. I may talk about the intricacies of language learning, and if something like that is ever in a post that does not include an update on my progress, it will go in a new category. However, any of my ramblings attached to an update will be under the study log category. In each update post, I will endeavor to let you know my most interesting sentence and word, by whatever criteria I deem appropriate, that I have run into in my latest study session. For today, my most interesting sentence was “Kadulla on auto.” Because anything else would be a little strange considering that was my only sentence for now. And out of those 3 basic words, the most interesting one has to be “katu,” for the simple reason that it was the only word not in my database yet. It’s the word for street. Not even a slightly uncommon word for street. It’s in the top thousand words according to this list (something I will be referring to quite often) and it seems as if it occurs more commonly than that! Anyway, I was just taken aback, because my database is 1600 plus words, katu is very common, and I most certainly know what it means. So yeah. That was interesting. My posts will take the title of the word of interest, with some topical English title if I can think of one. If there aren’t actually any new words in a particular study session (that’ll start to happen eventually) then I’ll think of something when the time comes. For now, I’m actually going to study some Finnish, so expect a new post in a few minutes, all you avid readers of the blog I just started now and haven’t linked to yet! See you soon! EDIT: Knew I was forgetting something. My progress numbers. Words Before: 0 Words After: 3 Sentences Before: 0 Sentences After: 1 OCTOBER 2, 2012 Follow Up – Syödä Well, that didn’t take long, although I’m not exactly going through the toughest material at the moment. For the most part it was 3-word sentences illustrating a particular basic concept. As far as a test run of my process, it went pretty well. Adding in the words and sentences is a breeze, although I had to remember to type in the sentences after writing them after I realized I had skipped the first few. Tomorrow, I will start reviewing all the sentences and words I’ve just entered, beginning the second portion of this process. The first portion is the actual writing and entering of the words and sentences, and the second part is reviewing those words and sentences through Anki. Anki is a wonderful program, my personal favorite SRS program, which stands for Spaced Repetition Software. The basic premise is that it is a flashcard simulator, and you enter cards to review. Like flashcards, the cards have a front, shown to you to prompt an answer, and a back, shown to you after your answer. Every time you answer, you rate how well you answered on a scale between 1 and 4, with 1 being a total fail, and 4 meaning it was absolutely too simple, no challenge at all. Then, based on your answer, the program presents the card to you a specified and slightly randomized (not really, it’s a nice complex algorithm that I’d love to look at one day) amount of time later, and then you rate how easy it was to recall the answer. This method works especially well for words, where you can review the word in the target language (Finnish in my case) and your native language, as well as the reverse. This has been the method I’ve learnt the majority of my vocabulary, at least prior to this reset where I now know nothing. This method also works well for sentences, where the backside can contain a translation, or it can even be blank. That’s the form I prefer, where the goal is not to guess the translation, but more to simply comprehend the sentence without looking at a translation at all. That makes the card about the overall meaning of the sentence, rather than simply memorizing a translation. Anyway, I’m off on a tangent a little with that. Suffice to say, Anki is an excellent program, I wouldn’t have made nearly as much progress in the past without it, and I’m essentially sticking with what I know with this program. Now that I’ve got more than one sentence, I’m definitely finding that the method I had devised for myself works pretty decently. I’ll see how the amount of reviews ends up being, but I think it should be totally fine. OK, that’s all sorted. On to the most interesting word and sentence of this particular session. For my word, I’ve chosen syödä – to eat. This was mostly random. For the most part I went through very basic vocabulary. There weren’t really any words that were particularly interesting, so I chose syödä because it contains “ö,” by far the rarest letter native to Finnish. I don’t know why it’s so rare. It’s certainly a sound native to the language. It just doesn’t occur very often. For my sentence, I chose “Turkuun minä lähden, en Helsinkiin!” because it contains a particular construct in its second clause that makes perfect sense to me, but is somewhat different from English. The sentence translates to, “Turku is where I’m going, not Helsinki.” The second clause of the sentence translates pretty literally to “not Helsinki,” but the word “en” is actually the first person form of the negation verb “ei,” making a more accurate translation “Turku is where I’m going, I don’t (go to) Helsinki.” Basically the “go to” is fully implied, and it’s a very nice construction that is very succinct in its meaning. Alright, that’s it for tonight. I’ll try to do some more of this tomorrow, although I’m going to be more concerned about my reviews rather than adding new words and sentences every day, because that’s kind of what got me into this mess in the first place. Bye for now! Words Before: 3 Words After: 16 Sentences Before: 1 Sentences After: 12 OCTOBER 2, 2012 Ilmestyä – To Be Published Well, the first day of reviews went quite smoothly. The number of words and sentences to go through seems manageable, but I’ll see how it goes over the next few days. I had to skip through quite a bit of the book I’m using on account of the fact that it was mostly inflection and conjugation tables for a few chapters. That doesn’t really lend itself very well to example sentences. The next set of sentences I ran into were mostly short 3 words things that illustrated a syntactical or semantic quirk or two. Definitely worth going over, and certainly a source of some more good basic vocabulary, so I’m not complaining. I had the first case of running into a word that was both not overly common as well as not in my database already. That word is Ilmestyä – To Be Published, which is also my most interesting word of the day for that reason. Actually, there’s another reason for choosing this word. It illustrates a particular concept in Finnish verb formation, that essentially allows an intransitive verb to be formed from a transitive one. The verb Ilmestää means to publish, but if the first Ä is changed to an Y, then the definition changes to act on the subject of the sentence. In effect, the meaning becomes “To Be Published.” This holds for any transitive verb essentially, and it’s one of a few little tricks that can be performed on verbs to slightly adjust their meaning. I might touch on this subject more another time. As for my sentence of interest, I don’t really have anything in particular note, as most of the sentences were 3 words. So, I’ll go for the only exception, one of the sentences containing Ilmestyä, which is: “Lehti ilmestyy joka päivä.” This translates to “The paper is published every day.” That’s it for now. More to come later. Words This Session: 16 Words Total: 32 Sentences This Session: 16 Sentences Total: 28 Edited by feanarosurion on 05 October 2012 at 6:34am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5092 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 2 of 5 04 October 2012 at 8:02am | IP Logged |
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Hyvä - Good
OCTOBER 3, 2012 Hyvä – Good Just had a decently long study session, at least in comparison to what I had done previously. I’ve almost doubled my total words and sentences from before, for which I’m sure this will be the last time. My daily reviews continue to go well, although admittedly I haven’t run into a large number of reviews at a time. This particular study session was productive I think, still short sentences but with a number of useful core words, among them hyvä, my interesting word for today. Hyvä means good, so it’s not necessarily interesting for its meaning, but I find it interesting that it’s taken me 3 days to come across it. As for my sentence of interest, that would have to be “Tämä on Pekan maito,” meaning “This is Pekka’s milk. ” That’s a perfectly valid sentence, and I’m sure somebody has said something quite similar before. I just thought it was slightly funny. Alright, well that was a short post for now, but I need some sleep. I hope to make a lengthier post tomorrow. Words This Session: 28 Words Total: 60 Sentences This Session: 22 Sentences Total: 50 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5092 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 3 of 5 05 October 2012 at 6:35am | IP Logged |
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OCTOBER 4, 2012
Mikään - Anything OK, I’ve added my about page! You can take a look here. I’ve put in a little bit of information of the 10000 sentence method I’m employing, with links to some of the original sources of the method. I’ll talk a little bit more about my specific methodology here since I’m already thinking about it. Essentially my method involves a combination of sentence mining and spaced repetition. Sentence mining refers to the actual process of obtaining the sentences for study. There’s no real system to it; some sentences are for specific words, some illustrate grammatical concepts, but in general, as long as it’s a full Finnish sentence, I’m willing to add it. I did most of my sentence mining using a Finnish dictionary with example sentences. I would select a word, then enter all the sentences under that word into my database. I actually ended up with almost 12000, and my plan was to go through those sentences randomly, but some were either overly simplistic, and others were well beyond what I was able to understand. So, I still keep the database as a source of sentences I can draw from, but I use it as a supplement to other sources. The spaced repetition basically just means I plug the words and sentences I learn into Anki, and then allow the program to give me the words and sentences to review according to its own algorithms. Sentence mining and spaced repetition go together very well, and sentence mining is meant to be used with some form of spaced repetition software. Right now, I continue to take new sentences from a number of sources. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m currently going though an English language Finnish grammar, mostly to build up my foundation again seeing as I’m starting everything over. I may be able to get through the entire book’s worth of sentences before long, as there are long explanations in English and charts of various grammatical concepts, with the sentences themselves serving mostly as simple examples for what is being covered in English. Beyond this grammar, I’ll likely move on to a graded reader of some kind, or perhaps the daily selkouutiset, or simplified news, from YLE, a major Finnish news network. Either way, for now, I’m just taking it one day, one study session at a time. My reviews today went well again, but I’m going to have a lot more reviews tomorrow. My study session today was a little shorter, but I continue to make progress. My interesting word is “Mikään,” which essentially means “Anything,” but is only used in certain contexts, and is often used more often with the negation verb “ei,” where the meaning reverses to “nothing.” My interesting sentence is “Minun on mahdotonta tulla tänään,” meaning roughly “It is impossible for me to come today.” The translation is very rough, and although the meaning works out much in that fashion, the construction is very different. Basically it translates to “Of me is impossibility to come today,” which is very different from anything that would be said in English. This particular construction is quite common, and I admit that I don’t know the exact subtlety of this way of saying things, but I’ve seen it enough to recognize it at least. This sentence actually came from my sentence database, and not from my grammar book. I used it as an additional example of the word mahdoton, or impossible. Anyway, it’s definitely my most interesting sentences for today. That’s it for now. Words This Session: 17 Words Total: 77 Sentences This Session: 13 Sentences Total: 63 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5092 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 4 of 5 07 October 2012 at 7:41am | IP Logged |
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EDIT: My link was messed up. My post is the first on
10000 Finnish Sentences. OCTOBER 6, 2012 Experimenting With Methodology – Omistaa – To Own Well, I got back at it today after missing yesterday in terms of actual study. I did all my reviews yesterday, so that was good, but I really want to study every day if I possibly can. Today though, I got back into it, and tried out something new that I hope will help me along the way. Up til now, I haven’t actually put anything on the back of my sentence flashcards, meaning that when I tell the program that I’ve answered the question, I get nothing in the way of additional clues as to what the sentence actually means. The effect is that if I don’t understand the sentence, I have no clues beyond the sentence itself as to where I might have gone wrong. In addition, if I understood the words, but the meaning was a little vague, all I can really do is look at the sentence again next time, and hope that I see something different that clues me in. My reasoning for leaving the answer side blank was fairly simple: I believed the sentences should stand on their own, without any information external to the sentence itself, and certainly without any form of English translation. My thought was that external information was basically cheating, or that if I need anything not included in the sentence itself, I was cheapening the learning process of reviewing sentences at all. And if I need anything in English, well, that’s just a complete failure. Plus, it was just easier for me to add the blank sentences, I could just passively enter sentence after sentence to review them at a later date. The only trouble was that once I got to the point of reviewing those sentences, I had lost the context that had caused me to grab that sentence in the first place. The bottom line is that my method has had a few problems up until now, but I’m hoping that’s going to change. If you haven’t guessed by now, I’ve decided to actually put some things on the back of my flashcards. However, I think I’ve managed to both avoid the absolute embarrassment that would be the use of an English language translation (*shudder*) as well as to avoid the use of any information external to the sentence. Now how was I able to manage that? Basically, the back of my cards now contains the sentence itself written verbatim, exactly as it was on the front of the card, with the exception of some clues I’ve embedded using underlining, bolding, and italics. Essentially, the sentence is unchanged. There is no additional meaning, nothing external, and nothing non-Finnish. I’ve just highlighted elements of the sentence in a number of different ways, to make sure that I notice a certain grammatical construct, a certain ordering of the words, or a certain word in particular that I was trying to learn through the use of said sentence. I now use underlining to highlight important bits of grammar, such as the use of partitive versus genitive case in an object situation, italics to highlight word order, such as where the object occurs at the beginning of the sentence, and bolding to highlight a particular word in the sentence, mostly to illustrate that I was attempting to learn that word when I selected that sentence. All in all, I can encode quite a bit of information in the back side of these cards, without going against any of my previous rules. Today was a test drive of these sentences using this format. I had a quick study session this morning, where it occurred to me that I could try this in a particular sentence where I wanted to remember that the object was in partitive case in the scenario illustrated (that was this morning, which is a long time ago, therefore I don’t remember which sentence that was). I liked the idea, and I tried it with the rest of the sentences I went over this morning. A few hours later, I reviewed these new sentences in Anki, and I liked the results. I essentially forced myself to recognize the relevant information in the sentences, and the meaning was extremely clear. I still don’t see the highlighting until after I’ve seen the sentence normally, but then if I was unsure of anything, the highlighted parts indicate to me what I should have been paying attention to. When I got home, I actually put the highlighting into all the sentences I had added in before, which thankfully wasn’t very many just yet. Tomorrow I’ll find out if this is useful on day 2! One thing I noticed in the process of putting in the new highlighting was that many sentences were quite bland. These sentences have nothing of significance anywhere. A normal subject in nominative, a verb with a basic conjugation (simple present or past), and optionally another object in the nominative case. Sentences like these usually just mean “this subject is/has the properties of this object/adjective.” The meaning is quite clear, and I’m not going to go out of my way to drive that point home. However, these situations might have interesting word order, or simply an interesting word. In that case, there might actually be something of interest down the line. For now, I think I’m done for the day. I’ve made some very good progress, and hopefully this experiment works out well. My initial conclusion is that adding the highlighting makes me analyse the sentence actively as I’m first seeing it, forcing it into my brain in a very good way. The highlighting is then useful down the line to ensure that I remember the subtleties of meaning on the sentence level, or to remember the meaning of the particular word I wanted to learn. Either way, I’m very hopeful, and I think this will help me get the most out of these 10000 sentences. My interesting word of the day is “Omistaa,” meaning “To Own.” It’s not all that interesting in and of itself, but it’s part of a line of a song by Moonsorrow that I quite like, Jotunheim, that goes “Ei tätä maata voi ihminen omistaa.” That particular line has a lovely poetic construction, and it means roughly “No, this land can never be owned by man.” Many of my words of interest will come from songs. For those of you following the video, be patient, the line is near the end. Either way, it’s a great song and a great band. My sentence of interest is “Pekka saapui Turkuun aamulla,” meaning “Pekka arrived at (into) Turku in the morning.” The sentence is mostly interesting because my grammar book used it to illustrate the way yes/no sentences can be formed in Finnish, and the flexibility thereof. It derived 4 new sentences from the first: Saapuiko Pekka Turkuun aamulla? Pekkako saapui Turkuun aamulla? Turkuun Pekka saapui aamulla? Aaamullako Pekka saapui Turkuun? The first sentence means “Did Pekka arrive in Turku in the morning?” This is the most basic meaning, formed by bringing the operative verb from the sentence to the front and attaching the question particle ‘ko/kö depending on vowel harmony (Ooh! I need to talk about vowel harmony! Another time I guess). The second sentence means “Was it Pekka that arrived in Turku in the morning?” The meaning differs because by attaching the question particle to ‘Pekka,’ it essentially places the entire content of the question on whether it was Pekka or not who was doing the arriving. That is, the rest of the sentence is assumed to be true, and the only thing in question is Pekka. By that logic, the third sentence means “Was it to Turku that Pekka arrived in the morning?” and the final sentence means “Was it in the morning that Pekka arrived to Turku?” I think that was pretty interesting! I’ll open this up now a little bit. How was my analysis? If there’s anyone reading who disagrees with my explanation of this concept, how would I better understand this? For a little bit of clarification here, I’m still very much learning the Finnish language, and if I come across as sounding like I’m an authority on the subject, that’s merely how I’ve cataloged things in my brain thus far, and how I make sense of this complex, interesting language. I’m always open to different interpretations, and I welcome any comments from native speakers of Finnish on any of my posts! If any of you know any native Finnish speakers, please show them my blog! I’d love all the feedback I can get. OK, that’s it for now. As I mentioned yesterday, I might be a little short on time the next couple of days. There’s no reason why I won’t be able to get a study session in either day, but there’s definitely reason for my posts to be a fair bit shorter these next 2 days. In the meantime, any other clarifications on my methodology that I can make? Any questions about Finnish I can address (from my humble student’s perspective)? I’ll address any questions when I next have time. Bye for now! Words This Session: 14 Words Total: 91 Sentences This Session: 19 Sentences Total: 82 PS: I had fewer words this session than sentences mostly because the 5 I talked about were variations on each other. I expect that, most days, I’ll have more words than sentences. It’ll get interesting when my total words dips below my total number of sentences. I expect that won’t be for a while, or at least it won’t happen consistently for a while. Edited by feanarosurion on 07 October 2012 at 7:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5092 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 5 of 5 09 October 2012 at 8:12am | IP Logged |
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found/">Löytyä
OCTOBER 9, 2012 Löytyä – To Be Found OK, today I got caught up on yesterday’s reviews, which I unfortunately forgot for the most part. At the very least I didn’t get the best opportunity to review yesterday. However, I’m all caught up now, so that’s good. I also had a bit of a monster of a study session tonight, so that’s really good. Milestone time! I passed 100 sentences! I actually blew 100 sentences out of the water, adding 34 sentences to my count tonight. Considering I was at 94, I figured I wouldn’t limp over this first major milestone. Here I come, 200! This is the second day, I believe, that I’ve had more sentences that reviews. This was mostly due to starting a section of my grammar on partitive, and there were a few very lovely sentences comparing and contrasting the meanings of sentences where a particular object is in nominative, and where it is in partitive. There were also a few question sentences that all contained, for the most part, words I had already seen before, probably to put the emphasis on the question words themselves. Unfortunately, I’m getting a little bit tired, so I think I’m going to have to cut this post a little short. I was planning on making a post on some more language study terms, but that’ll have to wait for another time. OK, my word of interest for the day is Löytyä, meaning To Be Found. I chose this word because it is actually a perfect illustration of a topic I touched on just a little while ago: the construct by which a verb ending in ä(ä) changes to y(ä), thereby transitioning the meaning of the verb from transitive to intransitive. That is, the verb no longer takes a subject which acts upon an object, rather, the verb acts upon the subject of the sentence itself. To illustrate that in a much better fashion before, we have the fine verb Löytyä, and its partner Löytää. I’ve only come across Löytyä “properly,” but I’ll be using both for this example. I also made sure that both words exist and mean what I think they mean. Alright, to illustrate my meaning, Löytää is the transitive verb, and Löytyä is the intransitive verb. Note that Löytää ends with an ‘Ä’, and Löytää ends with an ‘Y’. You might say that I’m bonkers, and they both end with an “A,” but that’s only partially true, at least in the sense of all of this being relevant. The letters Ä or A are at the end of all verbs in their infinitive form, depending on their vowel harmony, and the Ä/A is the equivalent of the English ‘to’, particularly as in “to be.” Therefore, the Ä or A at the end of the verb is somewhat irrelevant, and the verbs can be examined with the final Ä or A being removed. To that end, I will direct your attention again to the Ä and Y at the end of Löytää and Löytyä respectively. Essentially, the transition between Ä and Y (or A and U, I really need to get to vowel harmony) indicates that the meaning has gone from transitive to intransitive. Now, Löytää means To Find. If I were to say “I found my phone,” ‘I’ is the subject of the sentence, and ‘phone’ is the object. In this sentence, the subject (I) acted upon the object (phone) by doing the finding. That is a transitive sentence. In the sentence “I was found on my chair,” ‘I’ is the subject. The subject (I) is doing the “being” on the chair, while at the same time the verb (to find) is acting on the subject. This is something of a passive voice, and it indicates that either the person or thing doing the finding is unknown, or that it’s irrelevant. That is an intransitive sentence. Finnish has dealt with this concept quite elegantly by inserting a marker into many verbs, in the form of changing Ä to Y or A to U. The Y or U indicates that the verb is now either acting on the subject, or simply acting without taking an object of any kind. I’ll provide more examples of this later, but for now, Löytyä provided the first concrete example I’ve come across since starting things going again here! My sentence of interest is “Täällä tapahtuu kaikenlaista,” meaning “Here happens all kinds of things.” Kaikenlainen was probably more interesting than Löytyä, at least in its inherent meaning. Kaikenlainen is derived from Kaikki, meaning All or Everything, and adds the marker “lainen,” which is a sort of derivational particle that takes an adjective from a noun with the meaning of “relating to” or “a kind of.” More examples and info here! Anyway, Kaikenlainen essentially translates to “All kinds of,” and therefore the sentences means (more literally) “At here happens all kinds.” I think that’s a pretty interesting sentence. OK, I’m done for the night! More to come tomorrow. Hyvää yötä! Words This Session: 28 Words Total: 134 Sentences This Session: 34 Sentences Total: 128 1 person has voted this message useful |
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