New approach to vocab, day 3

kamala terrible
lämpötila temperature
olohuone living room

New approach to vocab, day 2

aiemmin earlier, before
tunti hour
tavara goods

The new approach to vocabulary

It's been a long time since I posted here, and my Finnish hasn't progressed much at all. But today I read an article that pointed out that if you learn 3 new words in a foreign language every day, you'll have a vocabulary of over a thousand words. And in English, 70% of what is written uses just that amount of vocabulary. So perhaps it's time to start that in Finnish:

haalari overalls
ikä age (how old you are)
juttu thing

Alko

Until the eighties the only places to get alcohol in Finland were illegal distillers and homebrewers, pharmacies (for rubbing alcohol), and the state owned and run liquor stores called "Alko". Then supermarkets were licensed for selling beer (kalja or olut), cider (sideri) and a popular Finnish drink that consists of gin and fizzy grape fruit juice, called a long drink (lonkero). All these drinks are sold in 2.7% and 4.7% alcohol by volume. These are given the strength categorisations of I and III, and you can see these Roman numerals on the can (tölkki) or bottle (pullo).

If you want stronger category A beer, at 5.2% ABV, or wine or spirits, you still need to go to an Alko. These stores have opening times similar to the post office, although I've been told that the austerity of them has diminished a lot since the eighties. A typical Alko will stock wine (viini), grain spirits (viina), and liquer (likööri) from various countries. You can get Australian red wine (Australialainen punaviini), white wine (valkoviini), champagne (samppanja), along with an intriguing collection of liquers and wines that are peculiar to Finland:

tyrniviini - sea buckthorn wine. About 18% alcohol, made from an orange berry that is popular for its high vitamin C content and not much else. The wine is drinkable, but only just.

lakkalikööri - cloudberry liquer. If you have to drink an orange alcoholic drink, this is the one to go for. The cloudberry is a rarity that looks like an orange blackberry, and grows in Nordic swamps.

koskenkorva - the most popular brand of Finnish clear white spirits, made from fermented distilled barley. It tastes a lot like vodka, and is often referred to as kossu.

salmari - the short name for salmiakki kossu. Ground up ammonium chloride sweets are disolved in koskenkorva to produce a drink that tastes like cough medicine, and is consumed in large quantities in Finnish bars.

terva snapsi - schnaps made with pine tar. Tastes as though someone spilt a bottle of kossu on the road during a hot summer's day and managed to scrape most of it back into the bottle.

After you've consumed your drinks, the empties are to be returned to the bottle return point (pullopalautus) in order to reclaim the deposit (pantti). This is quite a substantial amound: cans are worth 15 cents, and large soft drink bottles are worth 40 cents. Machines with bar code readers and an intriguing collection of conveyor belts scan the bottles and print out a receipt (kuitti) that can be traded in at an Alko or supermarket till for cash.

Or more beer.

Me, mine, you, yours

We've covered "you" (sinä) and "I" (minä) before, and noted the fact that when they're the subject, you usually don't include them in the sentence unless you're emphasising the fact that it's you or me you're talking about:

olen - I am
olet - you are
minä olen - it's me, I am
sinä olet - it's you, you are

Now, just as nouns can be altered using cases to indicate that something is "in the house" using the inessive (talossa), or you are going into the house using the illative (taloon), or something belongs to the house using the genative (talon), sinä and minä can be changed using cases too. However, some subtle differences come into play.

First here is the genative - if something is mine or yours, the ending changes to -un:

se on minun - it is mine
se on sinun - it is yours
minun auto on punäinen - my car is red
sinun kirja on kiinnostava - your book is interesting

A trickier case is the partative. We've already discussed the many meanings it can take. The main meaning is to indicate "some" or "part of" when it is used as part of the object of the sentence. In fact it is the most common case for words that are the object of the sentence. Strangely enough, it is used in the following sentences:

rakastan sinua - I love you
rakastatko minua - do you love me?

The accusative case is related, but rather than meaning "some of", it means "all of". If you want to tell someone to meet you, you want them to meet all of you (I know, you want them to love all of you too, but that's just an irregularity in the Finnish language), so you would say:

tapa minut - meet me
haluan sinut - I want you (all of you - to help out, for example)

With that last one you have to be careful, because if you said:

haluan sinua - I want you

it would actually mean "I want some of you" - which would carry the strong connotation of wanting to go to bed with the person. However, the following mistake:

rakastan sinut - I love all of you

althought technically incorrect, has a very poetic (and passionate) ring to it.

Conjugating verbs - type A

There are six types of verbs, which are all conjugated slightly differently. Fortunately the difference is slight. We've already conjugated one of the few irregular verbs - to be (olla), and from that you'll notice that the endings are all pretty much the same. It's just the construction of the verb stem that is different.

The first regular type of verb that we'll conjugate consists of the verb ending in a vowel followed by a or ä. Examples are puhua (to speak) and kompastua (to trip, or to stumble). We'll now conjugate to speak in the present tense:

minä puhun - I speak
sinä puhut - you speak
hän/se puhuu - he/she/it speaks
me puhumme - we speak
te puhutte - you (plural or polite) speak
he/ne puhuvat - they (people/objects or animals) speak

From this you can see that the verb stem is made by losing the last -a or -ä, and adding -n, -t, doubling the stem vowel ending, -mme, -tte or -vat/vät.

Similarly for "to trip", for which the verb stem is kompastu-:

kompastun
kompastut
kompastuu
kompastumme
kompastutte
kompastuvat

And that's that.

Vocab list 3

täysinäinen - full
pituus - length
huomata - to notice
kaukainen - remote
varoittaa - to warn
leuka - jaw
siansaksa - gibberish, jargon (literally - pig German)
todellinen - actual
puhua - to speak
säännöllinen - regular