Days of the week

If you're going to find your way around Finland you need to know which day it is, mainly because the opening times of the supermarkets vary bizarrely from day to day.

maanantai - Monday
tiistai - Tuesday
keskiviikko - Wednesday
torstai - Thursday
perjantai - Friday
lauantai - Saturday
sunnuntai - Sunday

Finnish for "day" is päivä. Note that the days aren't capitalised, unlike in English. Some of the days have familiar looking names, and some don't.

Possession

Finnish has a special way of modifying an object to show that it is owned or held by someone. There are the equivalents of the possessive subjects, or you can change the object:

mine - minun or object+ni
your - sinun or object+si
his/her - hänen or object+nsa
our - meidän or object+mme
your (pl.) - teidän or object+nne
their - heidän or object+nsa

However it is much cooler to change the object under possesion. For example:
Ei, olen isäsi - No, I am your father
Voimasi ovat heikot, ukko - Your powers are weak, old man

No articles

Finnish doesn't have definite or indefinite articles (the and a). Instead, whether you are talking about a, some, or the item in question is determined partially from context, and partially from the position in the sentence:

kukka - flower
pöytä - table
pöydällä - on the table

Kukka on pöydällä - (The) flower is on the table
Pöydällä on kukka - On the table is (a) flower.

Don't ask me how we know if it's a or the table.

Vowel harmony

Finnish has the following vowels:

Front vowels: ä, ö, y
Back vowels: a, o, u
Neutral vowels: e, i

Front vowels are, as their name suggest, sounded at the front of the mouth, and back vowels are sounded lower down the throat. A single word in Finnish either contains front vowels or back vowels, but not both (it can also contain neutral vowels). However, if two words are glued together and one contains back vowels and the other contains front vowels then ... well, you do end up with a word containing both, but it's really actually two words, isn't it?

To be or not to be

We had a nice regular verb last time, so now it is time to bite the bullet and learn about the most important, and most irregular verb. To be - olla.

olen - I am
olet - you are
hän on - he/she is
me olemme - we are
te olette - you (plural) are
he ovat - they are

As you can see, it is not terribly irregular - there's the usual n ending for I, t ending for you, and so on, but it doesn't have the same stem for all the conjugations. This verb is an important one - I've used it three times in this post already.

He or she?

Finnish doesn't distinguish between he and she, and uses the word hän for both of them. This has the disadvantage that you can't work out in some sentences whether the subject is male or female - but if you think about it that's actually an advantage. Writing instruction manuals is easier in Finnish than in English because you don't have to use clumsy constructions like "he or she" (and the corresponding requirement to switch she and he around each occurrence), or grammatically incorrect ones like "they".

In fact the only disadvantage to the Finns is that you meet the occasionally novice English learner who says things like "I saw my brother yesterday, and she is doing well." (For some reason they more commonly use she when they should use he, rather than the other way around).

Conjugating -ua verbs

Verbs ending in -ua are conjugated in a regular fashion. For some reason you don't have to put minä (I) or sinä (you) in front of the first two unless you are emphasising the fact that it is I or you who is doing the action in contrast to someone else performing it. Yesterday the verb asua (to inhabit) was on the list, so here it is conjugated in the present tense:

asun - I live
asut - you live
hän asuu - he/she lives
se asuu - it lives
me asumme - we live
te asutte - you (plural or polite) live
he asuvat - they live
ne asuvat- they (plural of it) live

Another typical -ua verb is puhua (to speak), which is conjugated in the same way:

puhun - I speak
puhut - you speak
häan/se puhuu - he/she/it speaks
me puhumme - we speak
te puhutte - you (plural or polite) speak
he/ne puhuvat - they speak

So far it's nice and simple, isn't it?