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Finnish after 1 year: how to continue? | ||
Tags: Finnish | Study Plan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| roni Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 3456 days ago 22 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 9 of 19 23 June 2015 at 8:31am | IP Logged | |||||
Sorry, I didn't write it clear. Working and answering at a forum doesn't work that well sometimes :) I wanted to say that I see my progress clearly. When I first time tried to read it was a constant pain, I couldn't read without cheating, looking at Russian translation every other sentence. Now I sometimes pick up book which I tried to read 8 month ago and I can actually follow. May be without all fine details but from context I can make a good guess what which and that word means. Also I've started noticing that I can pick up high frequency words from context. Not very many yet but something... Grammar still looks obscure to me. If I don't understand grammar construction when reading I skip trying to guess from context (again). I like your and Serpent's recommendations to try to pick grammar up in smaller pieces. I tried to use SRS for grammar but it didn't work that well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| roni Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 3456 days ago 22 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 10 of 19 23 June 2015 at 8:38am | IP Logged | |||||
Not really. My wife also studies Finnish she is more advanced than me in speaking and she can speak quite well already. She uses lang-8 with good results. I always think I'm not ready for producing text or speech. I have let's say 1-2 hours per day when I need to go through my Anki deck and then read or watch something. May be using 15 minutes per day for going through grammar would be the way to pick up some grammar without writing. I have "Finnish: an essential grammar" book. It is very good for me, very logical and short explanations. Edited by roni on 23 June 2015 at 1:35pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| roni Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 3456 days ago 22 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 11 of 19 23 June 2015 at 8:43am | IP Logged | |||||
:) I wish I had this. It is my goal in one year. I'm not really pressed to learn the language ASAP. So, first I would like to learn to understand what is going on around me, read press and books, watch TV (although I don't have much time for that). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4791 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 12 of 19 23 June 2015 at 12:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hey, congratulations on a year with Finnish and such great results! This is something to be proud of, especially as your language of choice is a really hard one.
While I have experience only with easier languages, there are a few thoughts that occured to me while reading about your experience and struggles: -Grammar. I am not always for small grammarbooks, sometimes a larger but well writen one is a better choice, however it is not meant to be necessarily read from cover to cover. I've found it very useful and fascinating to open my grammar books exactly when (and where) I need them. Seeing a good example of past tense? Cool, how about learning to properly construct it in a systematic way. Found a weird sentence where the cases are making a mess of it? Why not study such patterns. Basically, you are very likely to encounter all the grammar you need in your books and movies, and the grammar book can enhance the learning experience instead of torturing you. -The pacing. You mentioned studying grammar a few days in a row and burning out. Serpent recommended shorter and more regular sessions and that works for many learners. I have good experience with less frequent sessions. Grammar drilling twice a week or so is ok if you are doing other activities in the language the rest of the week and if you keep going. Unless you need fast results, of course. There are many options of the proper pace for learning, it's up to you to try and choose what works. -Vocabulary While it is true that a thousand or two thousand words are a good base to start understanding and speaking, it is still not enough for most activities. Many learners get into the defense like "you cannot solve the trouble by just throwing more vocab on it, the language is not about learning vocab lists" and there are right in some ways. However, you are going to need a lot of vocabulary if you wish to get your Finnish to high level one day. And Finnish doesn't share that much vocabulary with most european languages. So, looking up, for example, wikipedia articles about history (when watching history documentaries) or nature or sport or science or whatever you are interested in, that can actually help. emk shared his experience with the number of pages he needed to read to see progress. Mine would be a bit different as there are individual differences but the whole idea applies to vocabulary as well. From my experience, there are noticeable jumps in comprehension after something like a few hundred words, then around 2000, then after 5000, 8000 and later the gap widens, like 10000, 15000, 20000. Those are my estimates, just to illustrate the idea but some learners have counted and commented on their progress, for example Iversen. -listening Cartoons are a good choice. Disney movies tend to have good quality dubbing. Audiobooks are another great option, if you can find what something interesting for you. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6379 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 13 of 19 23 June 2015 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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True, long sessions are good if you just decide that you're okay with doing 1 hour twice a week and don't force yourself to do more.
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| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 5907 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 14 of 19 24 June 2015 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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For listening, I'm quite fond of the YLE Radio Suomi iphone app. The audio quality is quite good, (I'm kind of a radio geek a little bit so I care about this.) I find this is contributing to a renewed enthusiasm for the language. For me, it's some music, some news, occassionally songs are in English, but there are enough Finnish songs and those don't bother me even if I miss a few words. I think I have just enough listening comprehension to make the news not excruciating.
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| roni Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 3456 days ago 22 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 15 of 19 24 June 2015 at 8:39am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes. This is actually great, I didn't think it works outside of Finland. Or may be this restriction is only for TV programs. I use YLE Puhe application for Android. This is mostly talking with different hosts on different subjects, sometimes sport broadcasts and short blocks with main news. There is also Android application called Radiot, it allows to listen to dozens of Finnish radio stations which broadcast on Internet. I've stopped using it thought, at some point it had a glitch that it activated at random moments. I needed to uninstall it when it started talking at some meeting at work once :) May be they have fixed it already. I also can understand news - more or less and I can follow somehow YLE Puhe talks if guests speak not too fast and don't use too much slang (my understanding is very far from perfect). Hosts usually are easier to understand. I've noticed that reading helps a lot with listening. I took a break at some point with listening because my comprehension was very low and it looked like waste of time. And then I returned to it after 2-3 months, it was radical difference although I didn't do listening and didn't watch TV at that time, only worked on Anki deck and read different stuff: fiction, news, analytics on current events. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4948 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 16 of 19 24 June 2015 at 10:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not learning Finnish but Estonian, and I'm far behind you after 1 year of studies, a little less than an hour a day. I've been through almost all textbooks out there, but mostly en passant. I have a small vocabulary and I started to understand the grammar rules though I don't remember all the intricacies (Estonian morphology is said to be harder than Finnish). But now I want to focus on learning specifically what I need to in terms of grammar. Even if I decide to read a grammarbook from cover to cover, I still plan on pausing at the most important topics. It helps a lot when there are sample sentences, and to drill those sentences for the grammar rather than the vocabulary. Writing similar sentences with different words, just for the sake of practicing grammar, would help. If you have an old-fashioned grammar-oriented textbook with lots of translation exercises into your studied language, that will also bring good results at this stage (I don't find them much effective at earlier stages anymore). A good way to practice the non-essential cases is to work on practicing subordinate clauses. You can post those same sentences as practice at lang-8 for correction. You don't need to wait till something strikingly interesting happens in your life to write at lang-8, or else I wouldn't be able to practice any of my languages, for instance.
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