The finnish language didn't "adopt" grammatical gender neutrality, it has always been that way. Even our furthest language relatives like Sámi or Hungarian don't have that. Many languages are gender neutral. For example, chinese doesn't even distinguish between he, she or it.
I think the Christian and Muslim faiths contributed highly to grammatical gender in early language development. Because subjugation of female gender was so damn important for both of them for some damn reason.
@@Aquelll I have to disagree. 2000 years is nothing compared to the time scales of language families. Finnish and hungarian diverged some 6000 years ago, retaining their lack of grammatical gender despite being literally surrounded by Indo-european languages for some 2000 years. Proto Indo-european language (spoken around 4500-2500 BC) already had systems of grammatical gender. Christianity and islam have nothing to do with it, and I think you should check your base assumptions.
Finnish to English Kuusi palaa = The spruce is on fire Kuusi palaa = The spruce returns Kuusi palaa = The number six is on fire Kuusi palaa = The number six returns Kuusi palaa = Six of them are on fire Kuusi palaa = Six of them returns Kuusi palaa = Your moon is on fire Kuusi palaa = Your moon returns Kuusi palaa = Six pieces Learning Finnish is easy 😊
Not to mention the lack of future tense in Finnish language. You use present tense in Finnish when talking about future. So "Kuusi palaa" can also mean "The spruce will burn", "The spruce will return" etc...
He forgot to mention the easy part of finnish, which is that it is phonetic writing. If you hear a word, even if you don't know what it means, you can spell it.
My friend just proofed me that the opposite is not true, I mean you see a word but you can't be sure how to pronounce it without context. Example: HAUISTA. Hän näytti minulle hänen isoa HAUISTA. Lukuisista HAUISTA huolimatta hän ei löytänyt tietoa internetistä.
@@TheArseen but this is completely different from the original argument. Of course you know how to write HAUISTA if you hear it being said. The context doesn't matter, regardless of meaning you writw it correctly upon hearing it, hence it is phonetic writing.
@danielbriggs991 When saying "hauista" as a muscle, you put emphasis on "ui" so much it almost sounds like "uvi" and when "hauista" means "searches", the way you say it is more flat and the emphasis is more on "ha". Also the rhythm is different: muscle in hau-is-ta while searches are ha-u-is-ta. That's at least how my brain thinks it now in the middle of the night 😂
@@magicofshootingstar OK cool! The wiktionary page on hauista is in fact helpful here: it uses an inverted breve under both the a and the u to indicate that we actually have a triphthong in "of the bicep," whereas there is an optional syllable boundary marker between the a and the u in "from searches." Thirdly, the syllable boundary is obligatory and between the u and the i in "of pikes"! Please let me know if you reckon you'd pronounce all three distinctly-or more to the point, whether you feel you'd be able to suss out whether someone was talking about being from searches or pikes purely by phonology, not context.
Women getting the right to vote second in the world gets often mentioned, but basically everyone forgets that Finland was the first to give women full political rights. Both happened at the same time in 1906 when the parliament was established along with universal suffrage. (Before that there was the diet and neither landless peasants nor city men without taxable wealth could vote.) In the first parliament elections in 1907, 19 women were elected.
Women in Finland didn't quite get full political rights in 1906 - what was still lacking were the righs regarding municipal elections. The bill bestowing women the right to vote and be elected in municipal elections was passed only in 1917, and the first municipal elections under the new law were held in 1918-1919, shortly after the carnage of the Civil War which wasn't fought over voting rights in municipal elections but other stuff. Australia is sometimes quoted as the first country to give full political rights to women (in 1902), but that doesn't count, because in 1902, even as they didn't discriminate people politically strictly based on their genitals any more, they still did based on the pigmentation of their skin.
My native language, Hungarian is similarly complex, strange and difficult. It is very distantly related to Finnish, they are both part of the Uralic family, but a Finnish and a Hungarian person cannot understand each other at all, there are only a handful of words that are similar. But the grammar is very similar. Just like Finnish, Hungarian is also gender neutral, it has 18 noun cases, it's agglutinative, it can also have those very long compound words, the main stress is always on the first syllable, every vowel and every consonant can be short or long and so on. These languages are difficult to learn for people who speak an Indo-European language
Sana sanalta käännöksestä saa asiasta selvän, sanajärjestys hieman poikkeaa. Az alma piros= ”omena punainen” eli punainen omena sanotaan oikeasti suomeksi (finnül). Segítenél=auttaisitko (would you help me?)tälläinen oikeasti kertoo kielien sukulaisuudesta jotain.
I'm a Finn and when I hear Hungarian, I can't understand a word but the emphasis, the rhythm of the language, and the set of phonemes sounds familiar. And I have an acquaintance of Hungarian origin who moved to Finland at the age of something like 10. He now speaks Finnish 99% like a native, his grammar is prefect and his foreign accent is hardly audible.
As a fin I must say that most of us that don't live near swedish majority towns or at Helsinki, doesn't really speak that well if at all swedish. We have to learn it at school but when you live where nobody talks it well you can figure out the motivation to learn it. And the other thing, english is way more useful for 99% of fins than swedish.
How about the 5 % of Finns who have Swedish as their native language? (Clearly, 5 is greater than 100-99 = 1.) Is It not useful for them? For me, had my native language (in my case, Finnish) been some other, I would have become cognitively speaking a different person altogether, so the question is beyond mere usefulness.
@@kyyyni I believe that you misunderstood the original post (unless I misunderstood your post). I'm a Swede in Sweden so I'm somewhat proud that "my language" is taught in another country. I do however se a problem with it. The largest language in the world is English (Chinese isn't 'one' language). I would love to understand every language but it wouldn't be practical to learn 7168 languages. I'm an anti-globalist but I see the benefits of having one language that everyone know and use. I live in Malmö (a town with 330 000 inhabitants, in southernmost Sweden). We spend about 700 000 000 sek each year on translators for the healthcare (€70 million+). That's a lot of money but the interesting fact is that it doesn't include translators in the healthcare (confusing 🙄). The 700 million is the cost to educate and employ people like teachers, nurses, police.. to the level that they learn what translator to call. When those that doesn't know Swedish or English actually meet a doctor, the cost of a translator is taken from another account. The cost is huge if you include everything related (having thousands of translators on call means that it's the most common employment in the country). Cool fact: I've given up on getting basic healthcare in Malmö because the doctors doesn't know the kindergarten level of any Latin language. That they are used to people demanding hardcore drugs for the smallest sniffle makes my honest evaluations seem minor to them. To get a doctor that know basic Swedish, i have to overstate my problems. The experts are really good but you will never see one of them if you are honest. Honesty and language isn't what it once was. One global language 👍
I live in central Finland and I have only once heard people speak swedish here outside of school swedish classes. Two middle aged women were talking swedish to each other in the queue to cash register and this happened around 2018, I sent text messages about that to many people because it was like seeing a polar bear.
@boek2777 Perhaps I wasn't too fair to the commenter I reponded to, but rather nitpicky. I just wanted to remind that there is a non-nil number of native Swedish speakers too (and even more than 5% if you add in bilinguals who have registered Finnish as their 1st language, but have equally strong Swedish). I've never heard anyone complain or speak about translating costs in the Finnish healthcare. Perhaps it's the different number of people who need that service, or the service offered in Finland possibly having lower standards ("maybe the message will get across fine enough even if the doctor and the patient don't quite understand each other), or both.
7:45 It's actually easier. You know Spanish has UN/EL or UNA/LA before words telling if the word is masculine or feminine. We just don't have those prefixes separating.
You wondered how a language with no genders might works. It is the same but in reverse for finns. Since there is no familiarity or concept of language having genders, it is difficult for finnish people to try to wrap our head around how different genders might work. Finnish language is not as hard to learn as it first seem, it is just different. But unlike english, there is practically no exceptions in grammar, so once you learn something it is applied consistantly to everywhere. Pronaunciation is really easy, each letter only ever have a single way it is pronaunced, there is no silent letters, and each letter that you say is also written down. So when you see a word written down you always know how to pronaunce it, and when you hear a word you always know how to write it down. There is no spelling bees in Finland, since there would be no end to it, every contestants would know every word every time. Emphasis is always, ALWAYS, on the first syllable of the word. Therefore finnish language is very consistant language, which make it a pretty easy language to learn. Only difficulty is that it is different than most european languages, which mean you actually have to learn a whole new language and not just new ways to prononunce familiar words.
Indeed, having gendered pronouns is just 100 % arbitrary. If gender is important, we can add that information separately. If a language should have separate pronouns for people with different genitals (or gender identity), why not then also have separate pronouns for young and old people, or people with a fedora on their head and for those who don't? There aren't silent letters in Finnish, but there are unwritten sounds: kokous -> koko'us, hääyöaie -> hää'yö'aije, hernekeitto -> hernekkeitto. (' denotes the glottal stop. "Hernekeitto" is an example of morpheme-limit gemination, which isn't straightforward at all, and some poor folks even speak nonstandard dialects that can't even do this). Also, there are (albeit straightforward) sandhi; e.g. the letter 'n' is realised as either /ŋ/, /n/ or /m/ depending on context. The biggest hurdle in learning Finnish might be the unrelatable vocabulary. Things that are recognizable loanwords in other Eurocentric languages are usually decidedly fashioned "pure" Finnish words in modern Finnish. "Telephone" used to be "telefooni" some 100 years ago, but now you should say "puhelin" unless you want to sound like someone who just emerged from 100 years past. Similarly, "computer" isn't "kompuutteri" anymore, it's "tietokone". Speaking of Finnish vocabularly, the biggest part of it is borrowed from proto-Germanic millennia in the past. Speaker of a modern-day Germanic language usually won't recognize them, but an ancient speaker of proto-Germanic would, because the words are very well preserved close to their original form.
Nick picking: genders in languages don't work quite like that. gendered pronouns are nouns and the concept is different from the gendered Grammar (closest that I can think of to what Finnish have, albeit not the same thing, in the given regard could be the vowel harmony (a-s vs ä-s)). Eg: in Romanian nouns are feminine in singular, but transform to masculine in plural. It's actually more about phonology than assigning sexes to furniture... As for nouns, more generally, Finnic languages actually do have gendered and gender-assigned nouns (“aviomies”, “tytär”, “anoppi”, “tamma”, “-tar”, "-mies”). Vocabulary like that is used as it carries additional data. Gendered Speech is no impossibility either, eg: (“hyvä poika”; “naisellinen”). Gendered grammar isn't just feminine/masculine - exist languages which differ animate/inanimate for example. Out of the the three bigger Uralic languages, Conceptually(not by grammatical-gender), Estonian seems to distinguish between animate/inanimate the strongest, whereas Hungarian does the same between personal/impersonal - which is actually easily noticable and testable with how and when the 3rd-person pronouns are used for example: go use “se”(azi; eze) for a Hungarian person, and witness him taking offence for you having leveled him to a dog. Substitute "cat" with "se" or “see” while speaking with an Estonian, and she's keep looking for a chair or a rock, but not for someone alive ... at least for a while ... As she's no less confused over for what exactly to look for, than Finns are over usage of grammatical genders (how exactly order some "øl" for example)...
@@kyyynifunny you should use hernekeitto as an example! I remember from my teenage years that one day my grandmother (born in Turku) started talking with my aunt (also born in Turku) how differently I (born in Helsinki) pronounced the word. I use "hernekkeitto" as you said, but _they_ said it as it is written, *hernekeitto*. So there are differences in dialects for it.
Exceptions are mostly connected to names of the places. For example Tornioon and Ylitorniolle. You just need to know those. You can't here or found a rule.
Latin was the language of religion in the middle age because written finnish didn’t exist. But the problem was that no one understood it. That’s why Mikael Agricola created written finnish and translated the bible into finnish.
Greetings from the chilly, chilly (-30°C) land of Winland! Love your reactions! We do feel sorry for anyone trying to learn our language for the first time. I think it's ranked as one of the top-10 hardest languages to master? But there are some positive sides as well: pronunciation is VERY easy if you've ever spoken a "phonetic", especially Latin-based languages. Meaning that all letters are always pronounced the exact same way, there's no "silent" letters, and in our case the rhythm, pitch or stress doesn't really matter that much either. It's really the local vocabulary + "bending" the words that can be challenging. Fortunately, thanks to our location and geopolitical stuff, most people nowadays speak at least passable English, and quite often one or two other languages as well (mostly mid-European ones and some Russian). A lot of TV shows, games and other products are also in English, and things like aviation and military communication also is done mostly in ENG, which only speeds up the learning. Meanwhile, "nobody" likes or understands Swedish no more. :D
Sorry to break it to you but swedish is hardly taught in Finland long enough and quite few people speak it. about 5% speak it fluently, and about 5-10% speak it "brokenly" meaning you can understand it well but its not too good. Most Finns just settle with english, because that is the most important language and its taught so much more than swedish. Honestly is finland first, then english, and if you are motivated enough you might learn some swedish. But you wont learn good swedish with school alone.
@@theorycow Both. It's the different words, different way of speaking words, modifying words (some dialects make words shorter, some make them longer) and so on.
The language has weird rules, but once you get them it is very handy language that usually gets to the point first and then serves you the details. It is communication friendly and very fluid.. but, it is complex. It is also relatively new, when we look at grammar rules, mostly developed in the last 150 years to the current form. So, it is developed after age of enlightenment and it shows..
This is so funny 😊 l am native Finnish. 😁 and the most funny is seeing and hearing people from different sides of the world speaking finnish for example on a bus stop 😊 so , Finnish is easy to learn after all.
Most strictly speaking I learned it as a second language. I first began to talk in a North Savo dialect, but as my mother (not Savonian) corrected me, I gradually switched to standard Finnish.
In Australia I grew up bilingual, speaking English and German. My grandmother was part Finnish so I have been learning it for the past year. While it may appear very different to German, I have noticed similarities such as mina and mein, and sina and sein, which has made learning Finnish slightly easier.
We HAVE TO LEARN swedish, not like everyone want's to. And I think it's insane tha cities and even streetnames all have both finnish and swedish names.
It works both ways. I really needed to bend my mind when learning English. Because I needed to use five words English, when in Finnish I only needed one.
One thing which might surprise some foreigners more than the fact that finnish has gender neutral pronouns is, that instead of the "he/she" word, it is common to use the word "it" instead, even when talking about humans (not just pets for example).
The word 'hän' was actually fabricated by Agricola as he wanted to "civilize" the language of the peasantry. In Swedish one of those pronouns is 'han' which looks pretty same... clever. Kersti Juva who translated The Lord of the Rings to Finnish told in her book that she would prefer the word 'se' (meaning 'it') when speaking about people, as it is the real way in Finnish. Those kind of artificial alterations in our language are called 'sveticism'.
In Finland it's not mandatory to learn English in school. Mandatory is Finnish and Swedish and one foreign language, that you can select by your self. But if you study only one foreign language, it's normally English.
Finnish is really, really easy language to learn. I learned it when i was really young, around one year old. Even dogs understand finnish here in Finland. To be serious, if finnish wasn't my native language, i wouldn't pick it to learn as a foreing language without a very specific reason. Only 5 million speakers. I'd go with english as it is most spreaded language around the world. Greetings from Finland.
Finnish language is also among the ten oldest still spoken languages in the world.....should be worth noting.... When it comes to the "gender benders" - "Hän" isn't really used in contemporary everyday speech. It's still hanging in there, as a formal method of referring to someone, but like people use it even with pets nowadays so it just sounds off-putting. We refer to other people with the word, "it" more preferably.
Well, it depends which part of the country you are from. At least in Turku area 'hän' is used when referring to a person and also when referring to an animal (pets). It is almost considered rude behavior to use 'se' when speaking of a pet.
How does one measure the age of a language? For instance, the change from Latin to French (or any Romance language) was gradual: at no point did Latin simply cease to exist and French come into being. To speak about two different languages, Latin and French, one has to adopt the perspective of snapshots - "in the ancient times" and "now", with nothing in between - but in the level of the actual historical continuum, it's the one and same language evolving. All that said, linguists say that Finnish in many aspects is a conservative language, having evolved very slowly from proto--balto-Finnish (compared to e.g. Estonian). In that sense one can make an argument for its "old age", albeit a bit metaphorical.
@@chimmynah_and_kookie Also, we don't consider places such as Turku, Pori or Helsinki as part of Finland...Tampere is still on a borderline in that respect
Saudações do Finlandia! Estou tentando estudar português, eu comecei um ano atrás. Anyway that was probably a trainwreck of a sentence but I am happy to be sharing cultures, I hope you're having fun!
5:47 Actually, most finns don't want to learn Swedish because they find no use for it, the Swedish speaking population is so small. And if finns travel to Sweden, they use English, since both countries are good at it.
Greetings from Finland. My favourite football team is Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama. I even watch their games live online, if they come on reasonable time for Finland. I picked them up because I so much appreciate their effort on breaking segregation in national sports.
yeah you can hear from the voice if other one is somewere else... most natural Finnish speaking language you can find in Tampere. here in Tampere only word what we use difrend is NÄÄS and now days you can only rare hear that word to be used, its so old.
Technically there are 3 official languages, because Sami language also counts. in practice it's primary used in the very northern parts of finland where indigenous Sami people exist. You will find road signs in sami and finnish. Most road signs are only in finnish in most places until you reach southern parts where swedish appears next to finnish. Public sector services outside of the far north are provided primarily in finnish and swedish (and obviously english these days)
One tip I can give if kid about 7-12 (it seems easiest for this age range, but can be done earlier if kid can read fast enough. Later brain starts to be less "maluable" making learning harder) wants to learn other language (specially that has similar grammar as his/her native language) is to have them watch movies and TV shows in the language they want to learn with subtitles in their own language. Dubbing is little kids only.
Something funny about finnish language. In english : Assemble all of this midsummer bonnfire logs togheter. In Finnish : Kokoo koko kokko kokoon. That sounds so helarious eaven in my ears , and i`m from Finland. OK , finnish lanquage is hard to learn , BUT if you study it and learn you will find that some words have SO MANY MEANINGS depending which words are used. Totta tosiaan! (thats: Indeed in english)
you can hear immediately if somebody is not native even she/he speaks ok finnish. I haven't heard but native who can actually pronounce it and use it as it works.
A língua finlandesa é uma das mais difíceis de aprender no mundo. Na verdade, existe pelo menos 1 brasileiro no TH-cam que estuda finlandês e faz vídeos em finlandês. Saudações da gelada Finlândia, esta manhã estavam 21 graus abaixo de zero 🥶
5:50 Yeah, but at the same time, it is rare that you need to use Swedish language in Finland, sense Finnish language is in a dominant position in Finland. -Like one example: If you choose to watch TV channels in Finland, about 20 of those are free to watch, and from those 20, 1 channel is Swedish, and all other channels are in Finnish, or in Finnish and English. -Second example: If you wanna see that, if some restaurant, shop, etc. is open, you see on door or website word; open or avoinna (means open in Finnish), and then the times. You don't see tiderna in anywhere, and tiderna is Swedish, that means Open. -Third example: If you go to Finnish clothing store, and worker in there, come to ask from you, that can he/she help you, this worker asks first in Finnish, then when this worker realize that, this customer do not speak Finnish, then worker try's English (sense English is most common language in world and we also here in Finland learn English in schools), and when worker realize that this customer do not speak English either, then worker try's Swedish, or some other language. -Fourth example: If you like to play video games, you don't find Swedish language in those, but sometimes, rarely, you find Finnish language (aka translation) in those as well. Finnish + English are two languages, that are enough if you plan to live and manage in Finland for decades. I have lived in Finland my whole live, over 35 years, and i have never needed to use my Swedish language skills in here (outside of school). I have only used Finnish and English, and those two have been sufficient, because I've done great with them. In other words, most people in Finland, learn Swedish, but need to use it only so rarely, if ever.
It is kind of funny that you can twist some word in 1500 different forms. Koira = dog, is good example. Koirani, koirasi, koiransa, koiramme, koiranne, koirallemme, koirallenne, koirallesi, koiraltasi, koiraltansa, koiraltammeko... 1500 forms, good luck.
combine all with the "modifiers" and you can get a lot of nuances without long explanations koiranen = small dog koiramainen = like a dog (adj) koiraton = without a dog (adj) koirailla = doing dog-like things (verb) koirailu = the act of doing dog-like things koirakas = full of dog (adj) (well, we don't really use dogs for ingredients of anything) and many, many more... perhaps more useful with other words than dog. And similarly you can derive new words from verbs and (at least some) adjectives.
I learnt a little Finnish with a group of people from all over the world. People who know a European language, have a huge advantage, as they can read simple Finnish sentences easier. The alphabet is almost the same. Having said that, my Finnish is poor. I can read a little, speak a little, but when someone speaks Finnish to me, I'm completely lost. The most useful phrase for me, is 'Puhutko Englanti?' (do you speak English?) and they invariably do. Sorry Finns, I do try. Terveisin.
Friendly tip from a Finn: it's 'Puhutko Englantia?' ...As was told in the video, you need to add that 'a' there when doing something isn't... finished. 😇
The best way to tell if someone is from Finland, is (besides the accent) that they keep mixing gender pronouns. Example: she is my brother. He is my wife.
7:22 Mentioning a 3rd person singular pronoun, the guy says "han", but the word is "hän" ([ˈhæn]). "Hän" is very rarely used in ordinary direct speech; rather, we use "se" as a general 3rd person singular pronoun (plural "ne"). The word "se" also applies to animals and inanimate objects. Do not use "hän" in other than indirect speech or possibly sometimes in subordinate clauses if you really insist. In direct speech, use "hän" only if you have to be ridiculously formal (but note that in more ancient Finnish, direct "hän" wasn't used even formally), or if you want to sound sarcastic for some reason and at your own risk. Some people also refer to dogs as "hän".
We have never had genders in our languages. We never "adopted" gender neutrality. Finnish and its ancestor languages have existed for 6000-8000 years and have never used gender.
'Hän' might be used if you are annoyed about someone or think that they are trying to be fancier than they are. There is somehow negative connotation with casual use of 'hän'.🤣
In my opinion, this depends to some extent on the social class and education level. People from academic background tend to use hän more often even in informal speech.
@@Mr.Proghead, might be partly true. (Never noticed, even though I have doctoral education.) Also, it is regional. In my dialect, 'hän' is almost never used. Here in capital area, there are much more people, whose spoken language is very close to written Finnish and they are more likely to use 'hän'.
The fact that Finnish has no sex specific pronouns has irritated Feminists to no end. They had to really work for it to get something to complain about but they found something when examining brain electricity patterns. They found out that if a person's boss was a female their brain activated areas relating to females when they were talking about their boss.
I live in the Swedish speaking region, and i'm one of the few in my friend group that is only bi-lingual. I can understand Swedish when written, a bit when spoken but can't speak it myself, English being my second language. Couple of years ago we had a bigger get-together and there were four languages being spoken..
Swedish language is forced onto Finns in school, but its quite rare for people to actually know swedish even nearly as good as average person knows english. No one wants to learn that annoying and gay sounding language, but everyone knows english. Most Finns just think having to learn Swedish is an annoyance and is not useful anymore, but more like some blast from the past that no one needs anymore (except the few native swedish speaking finns).
so about the latin.. I wonder how it felt for the average old pagan to have to go weekly sit and listen someone ramble in latin. I doubt any of the church goers had any idea what they were listening to :D
Probably it was just forced break used for nap... life here in Northern rocky place was real hard for peasants, why wouldn't they use the opportunity. Though in those times (before the Reformation) many of the real Finns were still pagans and lived in the forests (wilderness) away from these beasts of the West (which didn't dare to go there for long time...)
Latin was used in church services across Europe before the reformation. It was a (historical) foreign language to everyone. Just the priests’ magic nonsense to most people whatever language you spoke.
We have "Noonii"(common to say if something bad happened, like dog shitted in house :D) and "nonii"(common to say if we start doing something) @@leopartanen8752
@@leopartanen8752 Also those words that break grammar. Words are spoken like they are written, but then NOniin, noNIIN, are totally different things :)
The Swedish speaking minority in Finland also has a constitutional right to be served in its own language in public offices, which is in my opinion the embodiment of democracy implemented purposefully and responsibly, ie. securing the rights of minorities spite abiding the opinion of the majority. Not many countries exemplify this as unequivocally as Finland.
"Minority" like we'd talk about some bullied part of the people when actually they are the richest and still the most influential group when talking about economy and business. Why the languages of Sami peoples ain't in the same position (faaaar away actually..!) ? They are even the same language family and Sami peoples have lot in common with us (like original beliefs)... That's because the Swedish were and still think they are our masters, but Sami people were always the same as us: lower race whose skulls Swedes came to measure (and took couple home as souvenirs...)
In Finland schools it used to be (when I started my schools on 1974 onwards and up to 2000 at least, after that it changed to have much more options), that on the 3rd class (10-11 year old children) you had to choose for the first foreign language between English and Swedish and then on the 6th or was it on 7th class (56 year old I have hard time to remember this) you had to take the other of these two languages you did not choose on 3rd class - so both languages you had to learn, 1st foreign language was learned from 3rd - 9th class and 2nd foreign language from 6th or 7th to 9th class. But nowadays you can choose more freely like Spanish, Russia, Portuguese, French, German or what ever as your languages. The majority 80-90% chose and choose English for the first language and that as well as the movies and Internet and Social Media mean, that practically everyone can and will speak fluent English, at least in Urban Big Cities.. AND all education in Finland is Free and paid/covered by the Government taxes collected - including Universities and Polytechnical Academic schools etc. - from the lowest grades in 7 year old to the Highest education levels in over 20 year old years..
Just to let you know English is not a mandatory language in Finnish schools but it is a mandatory to start learning a foreign language from the age of 7. However it is the most popular first foreign language to learn. It could also be French, German or Swedish for example if not English. Mandatory languages are the official languages Swedish and Finnish. Swedish for Finnish speakers and vice versa. You learn two languages at school other than your mother tongue at least. If you go to high school you might want start to learn a third language.
The dialects must be a nuisance to learners of Finnish. There's enough work wrapping one's head around _kirjakieli_ vs. _yleiskieli_ vs. _puhekieli_ , ie. *the literary Finnish* ("the literary language") vs. *the standard spoken&written Finnish* (like in the news and newspapers) vs. *common spoken Finnish* ("spoken language", common everyday parlance). The first two are quite similar, as standard spoken Finnish is just watered down standard written Finnish (or the standard written one is brushed up standard spoken one, whichever way one wants to think of it) but the common spoken Finnish can differ vastly from the standard way of doing things - mostly because of speakers morphing words (dropping suffices, streamlining the pronunciations, etc.), dialects (with their varying realisations of vowels and consonants vs. the standardised realisations) and slang/lingo/whatever the kids be speaking at any time. Now that I think of it it's quite similar to learning Arabic in this sense, as there really is a diglossia situation in Finland - there's the official language and then there is the everyday lived language, with many realisations of it. What a bog to trod...
Just to remind that "finnish" is not the word for our language or "Finland" for our country in our language. Instead, the country is "Suomi", and the language is "suomen kieli". People are not Finnish, they are "suomalainen" in Finnish
No. "Finland" is also the name for Finland in our language, Swedish. The demonyms are "suomalainen" or "finländare" or "finne"*. Finnish and Swedish are both equally Finnish languages. (* Some folks have claimed that "finne" means a Finnish-speaking Finnish person, whereas "finländare" means any Finn, but that distinction is not historical. Here Runeberg writes in Swedish, right after the poem that is also the national anthem: "Men annat var det nu med mig, Jag kom med ändrat sinne: "Jag läst om Finlands sista krig, Och även jag är *finne* ." ) Disclaimer: My native language is Finnish.
@mariano7654, You are right when we Finns are speaking to the other Finns. Then we use shortened expressions, and probably some popular words, which have been used only for some years. But when we notice, that the other person is not a native Finnish speaker, and we will usually notice that very quickly, then we will immediately change to the standard Finnish. We know, that this a foreigner can't be familiar with our spoken Finnish, so we have to make the things a bit easier for him/her.
I love your channel.Greetings from Finland. Love your face reactions. Yes i love languages.i speak finnish,swedish, english and german. Finnish language is not easy as a Finn it was hard to learn in school😊.Imagine to learn it as foreigner. Gosh!
He and her are completely pointless, the context does tell what it is about. The translator never uses the correct form, because there is only one form in the Finnish language.
Small correction regarding Finnish dialects. The difference is really not just a different accent, but the whole sentence may be said using completely different words and with a different accent.
The whole notion of the "3rd world" is anachronistic; it's from the time when there was the US-allied bloc (called the "1st world"), the Soviet-allied bloc ("2nd world"), and all the rest ("3rd world"). Now that the former "2nd world" is no more, we should at least change the numbering. Better still, discard the whole classification.
Yeah, it's an outdated concept and was poorly defined in the first place. As far as I'm aware, it's not really used in official political contexts anymore and terms like "developing countries" are used instead. "The Third World" still lives on in the speech of the populace though, old habits die hard.
Strictly speaking, 3rd world wasn’t an alternative way of saying developing world. As kyyyni said, it just referred to non-aligned countries. So you could say Finland WAS a 3rd world country.
No, the third world was the developing countries. The first word was industrialized capitalistic countries and the second industrialized socialistic countries.
English is not actually mandatory language to learn in Finnish schools. Majority chooses to study it though but the mandatory language is Swedish since is is second official language in here. But you have to take two different languages at least in Finnish school. From those two the Swedish is the mandatory and the second can be anything that is offered. When I was a kid I considered to have Germany as my second language instead of English but since that would have meant changing schools I ended up going with Swedish/English combination.
English is very much a mandatory language alongside Swedish in Finland. I'm not sure why think it's not. Maybe a regional difference. Where did you go to school?
English isn't strictly mandatory and never has been - only Finnish and Swedish are. That said, learning *a* foreign language is mandatory. For instance in my primary school, we could choose between English and French. In those schools where there are no other options but English, well, then the kids have no other option but English, and for those kids English ends up being "mandatory", not by law but because of circumstances.
Finland's universal official languages are Finnish and Swedish. Moreover, North Sami, Inari Sami and Skolt Sami each have a regional official status. Unless you have nothing else to say than to insult and disenfranchise a whole bunch of Finns, then just don't.
Well, Swedish shouldn't be official language of Finland and most certainly not a mandatory language for any finn to learn if they don't so desire. Mandatory teaching of swedish in our schools is only a metaphorical slave collar for finns from the past that shouldn't exist today
Whether or not Swedish should be a mandatory school subject for everyone is an entirely different question. The least I can say is that it's not a slave collar, as Finns have never been slaves (although the Russians tried unsuccesfully to achieve something along those lines in the late 19th century). Swedish and Finnish are both equally Finnish languages. A great part (some would even argue, the most important part - the one that defined the national identity) of Finnish culture after 1809 was created in Swedish. Just to start, the text of the national anthem written by the national poet.
Holy moly...! Hey look every one! We have a swede here! He wants to tell that xenocide and six hundred years of slavery is a good thing! There is no limit of how evil he wants people to know he is!
@@kyyyniRussians took a large part of the Finns as slaves at least during the Great Wrath and even before that for centuries. We are talking about tens of thousands of Finns when the population has been hundreds of thousands, i.e. a relatively large part of Finns.
The finnish language didn't "adopt" grammatical gender neutrality, it has always been that way. Even our furthest language relatives like Sámi or Hungarian don't have that. Many languages are gender neutral. For example, chinese doesn't even distinguish between he, she or it.
Grammatical genders vs neutral is about half and half through out world's languages.
English count as one too...
I think the Christian and Muslim faiths contributed highly to grammatical gender in early language development. Because subjugation of female gender was so damn important for both of them for some damn reason.
@@Aquelll I have to disagree. 2000 years is nothing compared to the time scales of language families. Finnish and hungarian diverged some 6000 years ago, retaining their lack of grammatical gender despite being literally surrounded by Indo-european languages for some 2000 years.
Proto Indo-european language (spoken around 4500-2500 BC) already had systems of grammatical gender. Christianity and islam have nothing to do with it, and I think you should check your base assumptions.
Neither does Finnish in many dialects. It is just the official written language where the distinction is clear.
Sure as a word, but not with the meaning.
Finnish to English
Kuusi palaa = The spruce is on fire
Kuusi palaa = The spruce returns
Kuusi palaa = The number six is on fire
Kuusi palaa = The number six returns
Kuusi palaa = Six of them are on fire
Kuusi palaa = Six of them returns
Kuusi palaa = Your moon is on fire
Kuusi palaa = Your moon returns
Kuusi palaa = Six pieces
Learning Finnish is easy 😊
Six pieces
Not to mention the lack of future tense in Finnish language. You use present tense in Finnish when talking about future. So "Kuusi palaa" can also mean "The spruce will burn", "The spruce will return" etc...
@@tomi213 "The spruce will burn" would be "Kuusi tulee palamaan". That would also mean "The spruce will return" etcetera.
@@erolaattori2317 It is "Kuusi tulee palaamaan" (...will return)
Also: "hän palaa" = he/she will return, or he/she burning.
@@tomi213 you can add words which tell it's future. just one example: huomenna kuusi palaa = tomorrow, the spruce is on fire
He forgot to mention the easy part of finnish, which is that it is phonetic writing. If you hear a word, even if you don't know what it means, you can spell it.
My friend just proofed me that the opposite is not true, I mean you see a word but you can't be sure how to pronounce it without context.
Example: HAUISTA.
Hän näytti minulle hänen isoa HAUISTA.
Lukuisista HAUISTA huolimatta hän ei löytänyt tietoa internetistä.
@@TheArseen but this is completely different from the original argument. Of course you know how to write HAUISTA if you hear it being said. The context doesn't matter, regardless of meaning you writw it correctly upon hearing it, hence it is phonetic writing.
@@TheArseen What is the difference in pronunciation? I pronounce them the same.
@danielbriggs991
When saying "hauista" as a muscle, you put emphasis on "ui" so much it almost sounds like "uvi" and when "hauista" means "searches", the way you say it is more flat and the emphasis is more on "ha". Also the rhythm is different: muscle in hau-is-ta while searches are ha-u-is-ta.
That's at least how my brain thinks it now in the middle of the night 😂
@@magicofshootingstar OK cool! The wiktionary page on hauista is in fact helpful here: it uses an inverted breve under both the a and the u to indicate that we actually have a triphthong in "of the bicep," whereas there is an optional syllable boundary marker between the a and the u in "from searches." Thirdly, the syllable boundary is obligatory and between the u and the i in "of pikes"! Please let me know if you reckon you'd pronounce all three distinctly-or more to the point, whether you feel you'd be able to suss out whether someone was talking about being from searches or pikes purely by phonology, not context.
Women getting the right to vote second in the world gets often mentioned, but basically everyone forgets that Finland was the first to give women full political rights. Both happened at the same time in 1906 when the parliament was established along with universal suffrage. (Before that there was the diet and neither landless peasants nor city men without taxable wealth could vote.) In the first parliament elections in 1907, 19 women were elected.
Well, everybody likes to hide their mistakes.😜
Women in Finland didn't quite get full political rights in 1906 - what was still lacking were the righs regarding municipal elections. The bill bestowing women the right to vote and be elected in municipal elections was passed only in 1917, and the first municipal elections under the new law were held in 1918-1919, shortly after the carnage of the Civil War which wasn't fought over voting rights in municipal elections but other stuff.
Australia is sometimes quoted as the first country to give full political rights to women (in 1902), but that doesn't count, because in 1902, even as they didn't discriminate people politically strictly based on their genitals any more, they still did based on the pigmentation of their skin.
And these activists always forget that women were given the right to vote - shortly after men were given the right to vote.
Why is that?
@@FSboy70 It was a singular Act of Parliament. WTF are you talking about?
@@blechtic I'm talking about the running divisive narrative and myth that western women were not allowed to vote because of men.
English: A dog.
Swedish: What?
English: The dog.
English: Two dogs.
Swedish: Okay. We have: En hund, hunden, Två hundar, hundarna.
German: Wait, I wan't to try it too!
English: No, go away.
Swedish: No one invited you.
German: Der Hund.
English: I said go away....
German: Ein Hund, zwei Hunde.
Swedish: Stop it!
German: Den Hund, einen Hund, dem Hund, einem Hund, des Hundes, eines Hundes, den Hunden, der Hunden.
Finnish: Sup.
English: NO.
Swedish: NO.
German: NO. Finn, you go away!!
Finnish: Koira, koiran, koiraa, koiran again, koirassa, koirasta, koiraan, koiralla, koiralta, koiralle, koirana, koiraksi, koiratta, koirineen, koirin.
German: WHAT?
Swedish: You must be kidding us!
English: This must be a joke...
Finnish: Aaaand... koirasi, koirani, koiransa, koiramme, koiranne, koiraani, koiraasi, koiraansa, koiraamme, koiraanne, koirassani, koirassasi, koirassansa, koirassamme, koirassanne, koirastani, koirastasi, koirastansa, koirastamme, koirastanne, koirallani, koirallasi, koirallansa, koirallamme, koirallanne, koiranani, koiranasi, koiranansa, koiranamme, koirananne, koirakseni, koiraksesi, koiraksensa, koiraksemme, koiraksenne, koirattani, koirattasi, koirattansa, koirattamme, koirattanne, koirineni, koirinesi, koirinensa, koirinemme, koirinenne.
English: Those are words for a dog???
Finnish: Wait! I didn't stop yet. There is still: koirakaan, koirankaan, koiraakaan, koirassakaan, koirastakaan, koiraankaan, koirallakaan, koiraltakaan, koirallekaan, koiranakaan, koiraksikaan, koirattakaan, koirineenkaan, koirinkaan, koirako, koiranko, koiraako, koirassako, koirastako, koiraanko, koirallako, koiraltako, koiralleko, koiranako, koiraksiko, koirattako, koirineenko, koirinko, koirasikaan, koiranikaan, koiransakaan, koirammekaan, koirannekaan, koiraanikaan, koiraasikaan, koiraansakaan, koiraammekaan, koiraannekaan, koirassanikaan, koirassasikaan, koirassansakaan, koirassammekaan, koirassannekaan, koirastanikaan, koirastasikaan, koirastansakaan, koirastammekaan, koirastannekaan, koirallanikaan, koirallasikaan, koirallansakaan, koirallammekaan, koirallannekaan, koirananikaan, koiranasikaan, koiranansakaan, koiranammekaan, koiranannekaan, koiraksenikaan, koiraksesikaan, koiraksensakaan, koiraksemmekaan, koiraksennekaan, koirattanikaan, koirattasikaan, koirattansakaan, koirattammekaan, koirattannekaan, koirinenikaan, koirinesikaan, koirinensakaan, koirinemmekaan, koirinennekaan, koirasiko, koiraniko, koiransako, koirammeko, koiranneko, koiraaniko, koiraasiko, koiraansako, koiraammeko, koiraanneko, koirassaniko, koirassasiko, koirassansako, koirassammeko, koirassanneko, koirastaniko, koirastasiko, koirastansako, koirastammeko, koirastanneko, koirallaniko, koirallasiko, koirallansako, koirallammeko, koirallanneko, koirananiko, koiranasiko, koiranansako, koiranammeko, koirananneko, koirakseniko, koiraksesiko, koiraksensako, koiraksemmeko, koiraksenneko, koirattaniko, koirattasiko, koirattansako, koirattammeko, koirattanneko, koirineniko, koirinesiko, koirinensako, koirinemmeko, koirinenneko, koirasikaanko, koiranikaanko, koiransakaanko, koirammekaanko, koirannekaanko, koiraanikaanko, koiraasikaanko, koiraansakaanko, koiraammekaanko, koiraannekaanko, koirassanikaanko, koirassasikaanko, koirassansakaanko, koirassammekaanko, koirassannekaanko, koirastanikaanko, koirastasikaanko, koirastansakaanko, koirastammekaanko, koirastannekaanko, koirallanikaanko, koirallasikaanko, koirallansakaanko, koirallammekaanko, koirallannekaanko, koirananikaanko, koiranasikaanko, koiranansakaanko, koiranammekaanko, koiranannekaanko, koiraksenikaanko, koiraksesikaanko, koiraksensakaanko, koiraksemmekaanko, koiraksennekaanko, koirattanikaanko, koirattasikaanko, koirattansakaanko, koirattammekaanko, koirattannekaanko, koirinenikaanko, koirinesikaanko, koirinensakaanko, koirinemmekaanko, koirinennekaanko, koirasikokaan, koiranikokaan, koiransakokaan, koirammekokaan, koirannekokaan, koiraanikokaan, koiraasikokaan, koiraansakokaan, koiraammekokaan, koiraannekokaan, koirassanikokaan, koirassasikokaan, koirassansakokaan, koirassammekokaan, koirassannekokaan, koirastanikokaan, koirastasikokaan, koirastansakokaan, koirastammekokaan, koirastannekokaan, koirallanikokaan, koirallasikokaan, koirallansakokaan, koirallammekokaan, koirallannekokaan, koirananikokaan, koiranasikokaan, koiranansakokaan, koiranammekokaan, koiranannekokaan, koiraksenikokaan, koiraksesikokaan, koiraksensakokaan, koiraksemmekokaan, koiraksennekokaan, koirattanikokaan, koirattasikokaan, koirattansakokaan, koirattammekokaan, koirattannekokaan, koirinenikokaan, koirinesikokaan, koirinensakokaan, koirinemmekokaan, koirinennekokaan.
Kamoon, ei oo läheskään kaikki monikot tossa!
My native language, Hungarian is similarly complex, strange and difficult. It is very distantly related to Finnish, they are both part of the Uralic family, but a Finnish and a Hungarian person cannot understand each other at all, there are only a handful of words that are similar. But the grammar is very similar.
Just like Finnish, Hungarian is also gender neutral, it has 18 noun cases, it's agglutinative, it can also have those very long compound words, the main stress is always on the first syllable, every vowel and every consonant can be short or long and so on.
These languages are difficult to learn for people who speak an Indo-European language
Nem tudom a számát. En tiedä numeroaan.
Luin että "Elävä kala ui veden alla" saa olla helppo, ainakin kun molemmat näkevät sen uivan. "Élő hal úszik a víz alatt."
Sana sanalta käännöksestä saa asiasta selvän, sanajärjestys hieman poikkeaa. Az alma piros= ”omena punainen” eli punainen omena sanotaan oikeasti suomeksi (finnül).
Segítenél=auttaisitko (would you help me?)tälläinen oikeasti kertoo kielien sukulaisuudesta jotain.
I'm a Finn and when I hear Hungarian, I can't understand a word but the emphasis, the rhythm of the language, and the set of phonemes sounds familiar. And I have an acquaintance of Hungarian origin who moved to Finland at the age of something like 10. He now speaks Finnish 99% like a native, his grammar is prefect and his foreign accent is hardly audible.
As a fin I must say that most of us that don't live near swedish majority towns or at Helsinki, doesn't really speak that well if at all swedish. We have to learn it at school but when you live where nobody talks it well you can figure out the motivation to learn it.
And the other thing, english is way more useful for 99% of fins than swedish.
How about the 5 % of Finns who have Swedish as their native language? (Clearly, 5 is greater than 100-99 = 1.) Is It not useful for them? For me, had my native language (in my case, Finnish) been some other, I would have become cognitively speaking a different person altogether, so the question is beyond mere usefulness.
@@kyyyni I believe that you misunderstood the original post (unless I misunderstood your post).
I'm a Swede in Sweden so I'm somewhat proud that "my language" is taught in another country. I do however se a problem with it.
The largest language in the world is English (Chinese isn't 'one' language). I would love to understand every language but it wouldn't be practical to learn 7168 languages.
I'm an anti-globalist but I see the benefits of having one language that everyone know and use.
I live in Malmö (a town with 330 000 inhabitants, in southernmost Sweden). We spend about 700 000 000 sek each year on translators for the healthcare (€70 million+).
That's a lot of money but the interesting fact is that it doesn't include translators in the healthcare (confusing 🙄).
The 700 million is the cost to educate and employ people like teachers, nurses, police.. to the level that they learn what translator to call.
When those that doesn't know Swedish or English actually meet a doctor, the cost of a translator is taken from another account.
The cost is huge if you include everything related (having thousands of translators on call means that it's the most common employment in the country).
Cool fact: I've given up on getting basic healthcare in Malmö because the doctors doesn't know the kindergarten level of any Latin language. That they are used to people demanding hardcore drugs for the smallest sniffle makes my honest evaluations seem minor to them.
To get a doctor that know basic Swedish, i have to overstate my problems. The experts are really good but you will never see one of them if you are honest. Honesty and language isn't what it once was.
One global language 👍
I live in central Finland and I have only once heard people speak swedish here outside of school swedish classes. Two middle aged women were talking swedish to each other in the queue to cash register and this happened around 2018, I sent text messages about that to many people because it was like seeing a polar bear.
@boek2777 Perhaps I wasn't too fair to the commenter I reponded to, but rather nitpicky. I just wanted to remind that there is a non-nil number of native Swedish speakers too (and even more than 5% if you add in bilinguals who have registered Finnish as their 1st language, but have equally strong Swedish).
I've never heard anyone complain or speak about translating costs in the Finnish healthcare. Perhaps it's the different number of people who need that service, or the service offered in Finland possibly having lower standards ("maybe the message will get across fine enough even if the doctor and the patient don't quite understand each other), or both.
@@boek2777 Interpreter is more accurate term.
7:45 It's actually easier. You know Spanish has UN/EL or UNA/LA before words telling if the word is masculine or feminine. We just don't have those prefixes separating.
You wondered how a language with no genders might works. It is the same but in reverse for finns. Since there is no familiarity or concept of language having genders, it is difficult for finnish people to try to wrap our head around how different genders might work.
Finnish language is not as hard to learn as it first seem, it is just different. But unlike english, there is practically no exceptions in grammar, so once you learn something it is applied consistantly to everywhere. Pronaunciation is really easy, each letter only ever have a single way it is pronaunced, there is no silent letters, and each letter that you say is also written down. So when you see a word written down you always know how to pronaunce it, and when you hear a word you always know how to write it down. There is no spelling bees in Finland, since there would be no end to it, every contestants would know every word every time. Emphasis is always, ALWAYS, on the first syllable of the word. Therefore finnish language is very consistant language, which make it a pretty easy language to learn. Only difficulty is that it is different than most european languages, which mean you actually have to learn a whole new language and not just new ways to prononunce familiar words.
Indeed, having gendered pronouns is just 100 % arbitrary. If gender is important, we can add that information separately. If a language should have separate pronouns for people with different genitals (or gender identity), why not then also have separate pronouns for young and old people, or people with a fedora on their head and for those who don't?
There aren't silent letters in Finnish, but there are unwritten sounds: kokous -> koko'us, hääyöaie -> hää'yö'aije, hernekeitto -> hernekkeitto. (' denotes the glottal stop. "Hernekeitto" is an example of morpheme-limit gemination, which isn't straightforward at all, and some poor folks even speak nonstandard dialects that can't even do this). Also, there are (albeit straightforward) sandhi; e.g. the letter 'n' is realised as either /ŋ/, /n/ or /m/ depending on context.
The biggest hurdle in learning Finnish might be the unrelatable vocabulary. Things that are recognizable loanwords in other Eurocentric languages are usually decidedly fashioned "pure" Finnish words in modern Finnish. "Telephone" used to be "telefooni" some 100 years ago, but now you should say "puhelin" unless you want to sound like someone who just emerged from 100 years past. Similarly, "computer" isn't "kompuutteri" anymore, it's "tietokone".
Speaking of Finnish vocabularly, the biggest part of it is borrowed from proto-Germanic millennia in the past. Speaker of a modern-day Germanic language usually won't recognize them, but an ancient speaker of proto-Germanic would, because the words are very well preserved close to their original form.
Nick picking: genders in languages don't work quite like that.
gendered pronouns are nouns and the concept is different from the gendered Grammar (closest that I can think of to what Finnish have, albeit not the same thing, in the given regard could be the vowel harmony (a-s vs ä-s)). Eg: in Romanian nouns are feminine in singular, but transform to masculine in plural. It's actually more about phonology than assigning sexes to furniture...
As for nouns, more generally, Finnic languages actually do have gendered and gender-assigned nouns (“aviomies”, “tytär”, “anoppi”, “tamma”, “-tar”, "-mies”). Vocabulary like that is used as it carries additional data.
Gendered Speech is no impossibility either, eg: (“hyvä poika”; “naisellinen”).
Gendered grammar isn't just feminine/masculine - exist languages which differ animate/inanimate for example.
Out of the the three bigger Uralic languages, Conceptually(not by grammatical-gender), Estonian seems to distinguish between animate/inanimate the strongest, whereas Hungarian does the same between personal/impersonal - which is actually easily noticable and testable with how and when the 3rd-person pronouns are used for example: go use “se”(azi; eze) for a Hungarian person, and witness him taking offence for you having leveled him to a dog. Substitute "cat" with "se" or “see” while speaking with an Estonian, and she's keep looking for a chair or a rock, but not for someone alive ... at least for a while ... As she's no less confused over for what exactly to look for, than Finns are over usage of grammatical genders (how exactly order some "øl" for example)...
@@kyyynifunny you should use hernekeitto as an example! I remember from my teenage years that one day my grandmother (born in Turku) started talking with my aunt (also born in Turku) how differently I (born in Helsinki) pronounced the word. I use "hernekkeitto" as you said, but _they_ said it as it is written, *hernekeitto*. So there are differences in dialects for it.
Finnish language can be really efficient to talk fast complex matters as one word can contain lot of complex information with all those endings.
Uskottelisitkohankaan tuota kielivähemmistöläisyhteyksissä?
Finnish is logical, as mathematics. Almost no exceptions! Easy to pronounce!
Exceptions are mostly connected to names of the places. For example Tornioon and Ylitorniolle. You just need to know those. You can't here or found a rule.
consonant gradation :(
Latin was the language of religion in the middle age because written finnish didn’t exist. But the problem was that no one understood it. That’s why Mikael Agricola created written finnish and translated the bible into finnish.
Greetings from the chilly, chilly (-30°C) land of Winland! Love your reactions!
We do feel sorry for anyone trying to learn our language for the first time. I think it's ranked as one of the top-10 hardest languages to master?
But there are some positive sides as well: pronunciation is VERY easy if you've ever spoken a "phonetic", especially Latin-based languages. Meaning that all letters are always pronounced the exact same way, there's no "silent" letters, and in our case the rhythm, pitch or stress doesn't really matter that much either. It's really the local vocabulary + "bending" the words that can be challenging.
Fortunately, thanks to our location and geopolitical stuff, most people nowadays speak at least passable English, and quite often one or two other languages as well (mostly mid-European ones and some Russian). A lot of TV shows, games and other products are also in English, and things like aviation and military communication also is done mostly in ENG, which only speeds up the learning. Meanwhile, "nobody" likes or understands Swedish no more. :D
Sorry to break it to you but swedish is hardly taught in Finland long enough and quite few people speak it. about 5% speak it fluently, and about 5-10% speak it "brokenly" meaning you can understand it well but its not too good. Most Finns just settle with english, because that is the most important language and its taught so much more than swedish. Honestly is finland first, then english, and if you are motivated enough you might learn some swedish. But you wont learn good swedish with school alone.
We can very accurately tell which part of Finland the speaker is from originally.
Up until the 90s some could tell even which village one came from. Nowadays people move around more, so dialects mix more.
That's cool. What elements of their speech reveal it to you? Is it an accent thing or is there a lot of regional slang?
@@theorycow Both. It's the different words, different way of speaking words, modifying words (some dialects make words shorter, some make them longer) and so on.
@@Sipu97 Interesting! Thanks :)
Born in Finland and 34 years old and I cant tell how this language works, it just does.
We also had radio news in Latin for 30 years but not anymore.
I remember listening to Nuntii Latini several times.. I didn't understand most of it but it was fascinating :D
The language has weird rules, but once you get them it is very handy language that usually gets to the point first and then serves you the details. It is communication friendly and very fluid.. but, it is complex. It is also relatively new, when we look at grammar rules, mostly developed in the last 150 years to the current form. So, it is developed after age of enlightenment and it shows..
Suomi on helppo kieli, koska lapsetkin puhuu täälä sitä.😅
'täälä' 😅
This is so funny 😊 l am native Finnish. 😁 and the most funny is seeing and hearing people from different sides of the world speaking finnish for example on a bus stop 😊 so , Finnish is easy to learn after all.
Finnish language is very easy. Here in Finland even children speak it!
I came here to write this, happily was not needed! 🤣
Most strictly speaking I learned it as a second language. I first began to talk in a North Savo dialect, but as my mother (not Savonian) corrected me, I gradually switched to standard Finnish.
In Australia I grew up bilingual, speaking English and German. My grandmother was part Finnish so I have been learning it for the past year. While it may appear very different to German, I have noticed similarities such as mina and mein, and sina and sein, which has made learning Finnish slightly easier.
Great video! Portuguese is just honey to my ears😄
We HAVE TO LEARN swedish, not like everyone want's to. And I think it's insane tha cities and even streetnames all have both finnish and swedish names.
actually there is also whole Towns of finnish people in AMERICA :)
Yes, I've visited one, New York Mills, Minnesota.
It works both ways. I really needed to bend my mind when learning English. Because I needed to use five words English, when in Finnish I only needed one.
One thing which might surprise some foreigners more than the fact that finnish has gender neutral pronouns is, that instead of the "he/she" word, it is common to use the word "it" instead, even when talking about humans (not just pets for example).
The word 'hän' was actually fabricated by Agricola as he wanted to "civilize" the language of the peasantry. In Swedish one of those pronouns is 'han' which looks pretty same... clever.
Kersti Juva who translated The Lord of the Rings to Finnish told in her book that she would prefer the word 'se' (meaning 'it') when speaking about people, as it is the real way in Finnish. Those kind of artificial alterations in our language are called 'sveticism'.
Hän = he
Se = she
That's how I was taught to speak.
In Finland it's not mandatory to learn English in school. Mandatory is Finnish and Swedish and one foreign language, that you can select by your self. But if you study only one foreign language, it's normally English.
12:22 =DD "Taloissanikinko", that's true.
Finnish is really, really easy language to learn. I learned it when i was really young, around one year old. Even dogs understand finnish here in Finland.
To be serious, if finnish wasn't my native language, i wouldn't pick it to learn as a foreing language without a very specific reason. Only 5 million speakers. I'd go with english as it is most spreaded language around the world.
Greetings from Finland.
Finnish language is also among the ten oldest still spoken languages in the world.....should be worth noting....
When it comes to the "gender benders" - "Hän" isn't really used in contemporary everyday speech. It's still hanging in there, as a formal method of referring to someone, but like people use it even with pets nowadays so it just sounds off-putting. We refer to other people with the word, "it" more preferably.
Well, it depends which part of the country you are from. At least in Turku area 'hän' is used when referring to a person and also when referring to an animal (pets). It is almost considered rude behavior to use 'se' when speaking of a pet.
How does one measure the age of a language? For instance, the change from Latin to French (or any Romance language) was gradual: at no point did Latin simply cease to exist and French come into being. To speak about two different languages, Latin and French, one has to adopt the perspective of snapshots - "in the ancient times" and "now", with nothing in between - but in the level of the actual historical continuum, it's the one and same language evolving.
All that said, linguists say that Finnish in many aspects is a conservative language, having evolved very slowly from proto--balto-Finnish (compared to e.g. Estonian). In that sense one can make an argument for its "old age", albeit a bit metaphorical.
@@chimmynah_and_kookie Also, we don't consider places such as Turku, Pori or Helsinki as part of Finland...Tampere is still on a borderline in that respect
Saudações do Finlandia! Estou tentando estudar português, eu comecei um ano atrás. Anyway that was probably a trainwreck of a sentence but I am happy to be sharing cultures, I hope you're having fun!
I'm finnish, I newer knew it was that difficult. :D
5:47 Actually, most finns don't want to learn Swedish because they find no use for it, the Swedish speaking population is so small. And if finns travel to Sweden, they use English, since both countries are good at it.
Greetings from Finland. My favourite football team is Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama. I even watch their games live online, if they come on reasonable time for Finland. I picked them up because I so much appreciate their effort on breaking segregation in national sports.
yeah you can hear from the voice if other one is somewere else... most natural Finnish speaking language you can find in Tampere. here in Tampere only word what we use difrend is NÄÄS and now days you can only rare hear that word to be used, its so old.
Technically there are 3 official languages, because Sami language also counts. in practice it's primary used in the very northern parts of finland where indigenous Sami people exist. You will find road signs in sami and finnish. Most road signs are only in finnish in most places until you reach southern parts where swedish appears next to finnish. Public sector services outside of the far north are provided primarily in finnish and swedish (and obviously english these days)
Not one but three official Sami languages in Finland: North, Inari and Skolt Sami.
One tip I can give if kid about 7-12 (it seems easiest for this age range, but can be done earlier if kid can read fast enough. Later brain starts to be less "maluable" making learning harder) wants to learn other language (specially that has similar grammar as his/her native language) is to have them watch movies and TV shows in the language they want to learn with subtitles in their own language. Dubbing is little kids only.
Something funny about finnish language. In english : Assemble all of this midsummer bonnfire logs togheter. In Finnish : Kokoo koko kokko kokoon. That sounds so helarious eaven in my ears , and i`m from Finland. OK , finnish lanquage is hard to learn , BUT if you study it and learn you will find that some words have SO MANY MEANINGS depending which words are used. Totta tosiaan! (thats: Indeed in english)
you can hear immediately if somebody is not native even she/he speaks ok finnish. I haven't heard but native who can actually pronounce it and use it as it works.
A língua finlandesa é uma das mais difíceis de aprender no mundo. Na verdade, existe pelo menos 1 brasileiro no TH-cam que estuda finlandês e faz vídeos em finlandês. Saudações da gelada Finlândia, esta manhã estavam 21 graus abaixo de zero 🥶
5:50 Yeah, but at the same time, it is rare that you need to use Swedish language in Finland, sense Finnish language is in a dominant position in Finland.
-Like one example: If you choose to watch TV channels in Finland, about 20 of those are free to watch, and from those 20, 1 channel is Swedish, and all other channels are in Finnish, or in Finnish and English.
-Second example: If you wanna see that, if some restaurant, shop, etc. is open, you see on door or website word; open or avoinna (means open in Finnish), and then the times. You don't see tiderna in anywhere, and tiderna is Swedish, that means Open.
-Third example: If you go to Finnish clothing store, and worker in there, come to ask from you, that can he/she help you, this worker asks first in Finnish, then when this worker realize that, this customer do not speak Finnish, then worker try's English (sense English is most common language in world and we also here in Finland learn English in schools), and when worker realize that this customer do not speak English either, then worker try's Swedish, or some other language.
-Fourth example: If you like to play video games, you don't find Swedish language in those, but sometimes, rarely, you find Finnish language (aka translation) in those as well.
Finnish + English are two languages, that are enough if you plan to live and manage in Finland for decades.
I have lived in Finland my whole live, over 35 years, and i have never needed to use my Swedish language skills in here (outside of school). I have only used Finnish and English, and those two have been sufficient, because I've done great with them.
In other words, most people in Finland, learn Swedish, but need to use it only so rarely, if ever.
It is kind of funny that you can twist some word in 1500 different forms. Koira = dog, is good example. Koirani, koirasi, koiransa, koiramme, koiranne, koirallemme, koirallenne, koirallesi, koiraltasi, koiraltansa, koiraltammeko... 1500 forms, good luck.
combine all with the "modifiers" and you can get a lot of nuances without long explanations
koiranen = small dog
koiramainen = like a dog (adj)
koiraton = without a dog (adj)
koirailla = doing dog-like things (verb)
koirailu = the act of doing dog-like things
koirakas = full of dog (adj) (well, we don't really use dogs for ingredients of anything)
and many, many more... perhaps more useful with other words than dog. And similarly you can derive new words from verbs and (at least some) adjectives.
I learnt a little Finnish with a group of people from all over the world. People who know a European language, have a huge advantage, as they can read simple Finnish sentences easier. The alphabet is almost the same.
Having said that, my Finnish is poor. I can read a little, speak a little, but when someone speaks Finnish to me, I'm completely lost. The most useful phrase for me, is 'Puhutko Englanti?' (do you speak English?) and they invariably do. Sorry Finns, I do try.
Terveisin.
Friendly tip from a Finn: it's 'Puhutko Englantia?' ...As was told in the video, you need to add that 'a' there when doing something isn't... finished. 😇
Hae lakkaa satamasta kun lakkaa satamasta
The best way to tell if someone is from Finland, is (besides the accent) that they keep mixing gender pronouns. Example: she is my brother. He is my wife.
7:22 Mentioning a 3rd person singular pronoun, the guy says "han", but the word is "hän" ([ˈhæn]).
"Hän" is very rarely used in ordinary direct speech; rather, we use "se" as a general 3rd person singular pronoun (plural "ne"). The word "se" also applies to animals and inanimate objects. Do not use "hän" in other than indirect speech or possibly sometimes in subordinate clauses if you really insist. In direct speech, use "hän" only if you have to be ridiculously formal (but note that in more ancient Finnish, direct "hän" wasn't used even formally), or if you want to sound sarcastic for some reason and at your own risk. Some people also refer to dogs as "hän".
We have never had genders in our languages. We never "adopted" gender neutrality. Finnish and its ancestor languages have existed for 6000-8000 years and have never used gender.
You deserve the Oscar for best astonishment
Igen!
: o
: 0
: O
Also noone even uses hän in casual conversations we just use se(it) for everything
While true in casual conversations, it is still correct, and used in more formal communications such as official documents.
People tend to refer their pets with "hän".
Humans are less important to "it" is enough :P
'Hän' might be used if you are annoyed about someone or think that they are trying to be fancier than they are. There is somehow negative connotation with casual use of 'hän'.🤣
In my opinion, this depends to some extent on the social class and education level. People from academic background tend to use hän more often even in informal speech.
@@Mr.Proghead, might be partly true. (Never noticed, even though I have doctoral education.) Also, it is regional. In my dialect, 'hän' is almost never used. Here in capital area, there are much more people, whose spoken language is very close to written Finnish and they are more likely to use 'hän'.
The fact that Finnish has no sex specific pronouns has irritated Feminists to no end.
They had to really work for it to get something to complain about but they found something when examining brain electricity patterns.
They found out that if a person's boss was a female their brain activated areas relating to females when they were talking about their boss.
finnish language is pain in the ass. welcome to finland :D
I live in the Swedish speaking region, and i'm one of the few in my friend group that is only bi-lingual. I can understand Swedish when written, a bit when spoken but can't speak it myself, English being my second language. Couple of years ago we had a bigger get-together and there were four languages being spoken..
Swedish language is forced onto Finns in school, but its quite rare for people to actually know swedish even nearly as good as average person knows english. No one wants to learn that annoying and gay sounding language, but everyone knows english. Most Finns just think having to learn Swedish is an annoyance and is not useful anymore, but more like some blast from the past that no one needs anymore (except the few native swedish speaking finns).
so about the latin.. I wonder how it felt for the average old pagan to have to go weekly sit and listen someone ramble in latin. I doubt any of the church goers had any idea what they were listening to :D
Probably it was just forced break used for nap... life here in Northern rocky place was real hard for peasants, why wouldn't they use the opportunity. Though in those times (before the Reformation) many of the real Finns were still pagans and lived in the forests (wilderness) away from these beasts of the West (which didn't dare to go there for long time...)
@@mimia85 :D forced break.. is a nice way to look at it. nap time
Latin was used in church services across Europe before the reformation. It was a (historical) foreign language to everyone. Just the priests’ magic nonsense to most people whatever language you spoke.
Turkish and Persian have no gendered pronouns either. People read too much meaning into this detail.
Just learn only one word, Noniin. It's all you need.
After that it's all about how you breathe while saying it
or "nonii" if speaking Estonian :D
@@siimtulev1759Yeah, Finnish has many ways to say "no niin" and we say it like that too: "nonii", "noni", "nonnii", "nonni", "nonniin". 😁
We have "Noonii"(common to say if something bad happened, like dog shitted in house :D) and "nonii"(common to say if we start doing something) @@leopartanen8752
@@leopartanen8752 Also those words that break grammar. Words are spoken like they are written, but then NOniin, noNIIN, are totally different things :)
The Swedish speaking minority in Finland also has a constitutional right to be served in its own language in public offices, which is in my opinion the embodiment of democracy implemented purposefully and responsibly, ie. securing the rights of minorities spite abiding the opinion of the majority. Not many countries exemplify this as unequivocally as Finland.
"Minority" like we'd talk about some bullied part of the people when actually they are the richest and still the most influential group when talking about economy and business. Why the languages of Sami peoples ain't in the same position (faaaar away actually..!) ? They are even the same language family and Sami peoples have lot in common with us (like original beliefs)... That's because the Swedish were and still think they are our masters, but Sami people were always the same as us: lower race whose skulls Swedes came to measure (and took couple home as souvenirs...)
In Finland schools it used to be (when I started my schools on 1974 onwards and up to 2000 at least, after that it changed to have much more options), that on the 3rd class (10-11 year old children) you had to choose for the first foreign language between English and Swedish and then on the 6th or was it on 7th class (56 year old I have hard time to remember this) you had to take the other of these two languages you did not choose on 3rd class - so both languages you had to learn, 1st foreign language was learned from 3rd - 9th class and 2nd foreign language from 6th or 7th to 9th class. But nowadays you can choose more freely like Spanish, Russia, Portuguese, French, German or what ever as your languages. The majority 80-90% chose and choose English for the first language and that as well as the movies and Internet and Social Media mean, that practically everyone can and will speak fluent English, at least in Urban Big Cities.. AND all education in Finland is Free and paid/covered by the Government taxes collected - including Universities and Polytechnical Academic schools etc. - from the lowest grades in 7 year old to the Highest education levels in over 20 year old years..
Just to let you know English is not a mandatory language in Finnish schools but it is a mandatory to start learning a foreign language from the age of 7. However it is the most popular first foreign language to learn. It could also be French, German or Swedish for example if not English. Mandatory languages are the official languages Swedish and Finnish. Swedish for Finnish speakers and vice versa. You learn two languages at school other than your mother tongue at least. If you go to high school you might want start to learn a third language.
8:06 Visionary that Finns adopted no genders in pronouns.. like, over 1000 years ago they knew about political correctness and woke movement.
thousands and thousands years ago, actually :)
The dialects must be a nuisance to learners of Finnish. There's enough work wrapping one's head around
_kirjakieli_ vs. _yleiskieli_ vs. _puhekieli_ ,
ie. *the literary Finnish* ("the literary language") vs. *the standard spoken&written Finnish* (like in the news and newspapers) vs. *common spoken Finnish* ("spoken language", common everyday parlance).
The first two are quite similar, as standard spoken Finnish is just watered down standard written Finnish (or the standard written one is brushed up standard spoken one, whichever way one wants to think of it)
but
the common spoken Finnish can differ vastly from the standard way of doing things - mostly because of speakers morphing words (dropping suffices, streamlining the pronunciations, etc.), dialects (with their varying realisations of vowels and consonants vs. the standardised realisations) and slang/lingo/whatever the kids be speaking at any time.
Now that I think of it it's quite similar to learning Arabic in this sense, as there really is a diglossia situation in Finland - there's the official language and then there is the everyday lived language, with many realisations of it. What a bog to trod...
Just to remind that "finnish" is not the word for our language or "Finland" for our country in our language. Instead, the country is "Suomi", and the language is "suomen kieli". People are not Finnish, they are "suomalainen" in Finnish
No. "Finland" is also the name for Finland in our language, Swedish. The demonyms are "suomalainen" or "finländare" or "finne"*. Finnish and Swedish are both equally Finnish languages.
(* Some folks have claimed that "finne" means a Finnish-speaking Finnish person, whereas "finländare" means any Finn, but that distinction is not historical. Here Runeberg writes in Swedish, right after the poem that is also the national anthem:
"Men annat var det nu med mig,
Jag kom med ändrat sinne:
"Jag läst om Finlands sista krig,
Och även jag är *finne* ." )
Disclaimer: My native language is Finnish.
@@kyyyni That's not 'our language' if you ain't a Swede. It's a brutal relic for Finns.
uusi seelanti oli maa joka ensimmäisenä antoi naisille äänioikeuden,mutta suomi oli euroopassa ensimmäinen.
Every comment has text "käännä kielelle suomi" below
Plus nobody speaks standard Finnish which is what you learn when studying Finnish. So not very easy to leagn to understand a Finnish person
@mariano7654, You are right when we Finns are speaking to the other Finns. Then we use shortened expressions, and probably some popular words, which have been used only for some years. But when we notice, that the other person is not a native Finnish speaker, and we will usually notice that very quickly, then we will immediately change to the standard Finnish. We know, that this a foreigner can't be familiar with our spoken Finnish, so we have to make the things a bit easier for him/her.
päivää,ja kiitos.Mukava videon pätkä
I live in Mikkeli, eastern-Finland. I speak savo-dialect.
Kalevala is collected from Russian Karelia, because in Finland We did not had that kind poets and songs anymore.
Wrong, the Kalevala was collected from Karelia in Finland
@@PR-jb9uu No, it was collected mostly from Viena Karelia.
I love your channel.Greetings from Finland. Love your face reactions. Yes i love languages.i speak finnish,swedish, english and german.
Finnish language is not easy as a Finn it was hard to learn in school😊.Imagine to learn it as foreigner. Gosh!
Torilla tavataan! :)
He and her are completely pointless, the context does tell what it is about. The translator never uses the correct form, because there is only one form in the Finnish language.
I guess you have already heard this following, Finnish, conversation:
"Koko kokkoko kokoonko?"
"Koko kokko kokonaan kokoon."
In English:
"Should I build up the whole bonfire?"
"Yes, Build up the whole bonfile."
Easy as 1-2-c..
Small correction regarding Finnish dialects. The difference is really not just a different accent, but the whole sentence may be said using completely different words and with a different accent.
Would you like a native speaker to comment your videos?
Mies Toijalasta toi jalasta ja lasta jalasta Toijalasta.
The whole notion of the "3rd world" is anachronistic; it's from the time when there was the US-allied bloc (called the "1st world"), the Soviet-allied bloc ("2nd world"), and all the rest ("3rd world"). Now that the former "2nd world" is no more, we should at least change the numbering. Better still, discard the whole classification.
Yeah, it's an outdated concept and was poorly defined in the first place. As far as I'm aware, it's not really used in official political contexts anymore and terms like "developing countries" are used instead. "The Third World" still lives on in the speech of the populace though, old habits die hard.
Strictly speaking, 3rd world wasn’t an alternative way of saying developing world. As kyyyni said, it just referred to non-aligned countries. So you could say Finland WAS a 3rd world country.
No, the third world was the developing countries. The first word was industrialized capitalistic countries and the second industrialized socialistic countries.
English is not actually mandatory language to learn in Finnish schools. Majority chooses to study it though but the mandatory language is Swedish since is is second official language in here. But you have to take two different languages at least in Finnish school. From those two the Swedish is the mandatory and the second can be anything that is offered. When I was a kid I considered to have Germany as my second language instead of English but since that would have meant changing schools I ended up going with Swedish/English combination.
English is very much a mandatory language alongside Swedish in Finland. I'm not sure why think it's not. Maybe a regional difference. Where did you go to school?
English isn't strictly mandatory and never has been - only Finnish and Swedish are. That said, learning *a* foreign language is mandatory. For instance in my primary school, we could choose between English and French. In those schools where there are no other options but English, well, then the kids have no other option but English, and for those kids English ends up being "mandatory", not by law but because of circumstances.
Ite puhun suomee
5:44 There are no two languages. Finland's language is only Finnish. :)
Finland's universal official languages are Finnish and Swedish. Moreover, North Sami, Inari Sami and Skolt Sami each have a regional official status. Unless you have nothing else to say than to insult and disenfranchise a whole bunch of Finns, then just don't.
Well, Swedish shouldn't be official language of Finland and most certainly not a mandatory language for any finn to learn if they don't so desire. Mandatory teaching of swedish in our schools is only a metaphorical slave collar for finns from the past that shouldn't exist today
Whether or not Swedish should be a mandatory school subject for everyone is an entirely different question. The least I can say is that it's not a slave collar, as Finns have never been slaves (although the Russians tried unsuccesfully to achieve something along those lines in the late 19th century). Swedish and Finnish are both equally Finnish languages. A great part (some would even argue, the most important part - the one that defined the national identity) of Finnish culture after 1809 was created in Swedish. Just to start, the text of the national anthem written by the national poet.
Holy moly...! Hey look every one! We have a swede here! He wants to tell that xenocide and six hundred years of slavery is a good thing! There is no limit of how evil he wants people to know he is!
@@kyyyniRussians took a large part of the Finns as slaves at least during the Great Wrath and even before that for centuries.
We are talking about tens of thousands of Finns when the population has been hundreds of thousands, i.e. a relatively large part of Finns.