#learning finnish

[07.08.26, friday]

Did I make the trip all the way to my favorite library although now I live quite far away? Yes and I think I'll continue to do so tbh. Did some studying there in the morning, and also went for a walk around my new area in the evening. I love being so close to the water.

-> 10 mins of flashcards

-> 15 mins of reading Tytöt Tytöt Tytöt in easy finnish

-> 15 min of case inflection and verb conjugation practice

- There are no roses for pigs

- One potato at a time

- Put ice in their hats

- The horses are escaping

- She's no spring onion

I'm new to Tumblr and I created this account to dive more into the cultural aspects and language of humans, hoping to meet an awesome buddy/penpal to help with the study process so we can both help motivate each other and learn!

I have always loved learning new stuff, as a lot of things in this world have intrigued me.

The languages I'm currently learning are the following listed to priority:

Currently Studying:

🇩🇪 1. German (3+ years, around A~B).

🇯🇵 2. Japanese (off and on).

🇫🇷 3. French (beginner!).

On Hold:

🇨🇳 Chinese.

🇪🇸 Spanish.

🤟 ASL (American Sign Language).

Haven't Started:

🇧🇷 Portuguese (Brazillian).

🇷🇺 Russian.

🇰🇷 Korean.

✨️ Latin.

Might Want to Learn:

🇸🇪🇫🇮 Scandinavian Languages.

🇦🇪 Arabic.

🇮🇩 Indonesian.

🇺🇦 Ukranian.

If you thought, "hey, these languages align with the one(s) I'm studying right now!", then feel free to send me a message! *Even if It's non-language related, feel free to send me a message about culture, music, your interests, etcetera!

Things to keep in mind:

I don't study everyday, I study only when I want to. Though ofcourse once you've sent a message, I'll try to reply as fast as I can.

I'm very bad with grammar (e; Japanese), so I naturally lean more towards a language's vocabulairy first. We can still learn grammar, It's just something to keep in mind.

I'm a casual and slow learner, I take my time to learn a language.

Idk who needs it but I thought I might share some free online resources that I found helpful for other broke overwhelmed learners.

Updated 2025/12/15

[updated the link for Taste of Finnish, added a site for learning puhekieli]

I'm pinning this for now since I keep adding new resources.

A couple of years back I came across for the first time a person that spoke only one language, and was trying to learn the same language as me (for those interested, the language was Klingon). As I was having a conversation about the language with them, I understood that they had no idea that languages view the world very differently, since they insisted that a translation must carry all the meanings that the original word in the other language has. Or rather they did not understand that words have multiple semantic meanings. In this case they could not grasp that the word rich means a different thing in "a rich person" and "rich soil". The first means "has a lot of money", and the second means " has a lot of minerals/is fertile" and in Finnish these both cannot be conveyed with a single word like in English. Not understanding the difference, to me is silly of course, but made me realize that maybe people do not really understand how arbitrary vocabulary is.

The world is not actually made up of categories, but since people love categories to make sense of the world, we have decided on categories and words for them. Some categories are more explicit and I feel that these do not confuse language learners much. Eg. a language having extra or fewer names for colours is rather easy to understand. What is more difficult, is to see the categories in a language that are not as obvious, for example categories of phenomena. A great way to illustrate this is the word hallita which can be translated in at least 13 different ways in English.

However this does not mean that all this translations would always be translated back to hallita in Finnish. Here is an example:

"Minä hallitsen tätä maata" would be "I govern this country".

However, "The market governed her decision" would be "Markkinat ohjasivat hänen päätöstään".

Here you can see that the way these languages view this phenomena of having power over others is different, and the languages view different situations in different ways. The situations are categorized differently.

Also usually the more related the languages are, the more similar the categories are (although not always). And I think that this disconnection with categories of phenomena and situations is the most difficult thing of learning a foreign – and especially non-related language. Learning a new language means learning a totally new way to view the world, and as category loving beings, we find it difficult. But in my humble opinion, that is the best part of learning a language.

[26.09.25, friday]

Welp I did not feel good enough to try to fight for a spot in the library, but managed to have a pretty productive study session at home! I really needed to do a little summary of all the past tenses I have been studying, have all the info in the same place because I was going insane. I do think it'll help, now I just gotta practice and practice until it comes naturally.

I had my first lesson after 3 weeks! It was lots of speaking practice, mainly about my stay here and what I've been doing. We also did some revising on the tenses, which was pretty fitting. So yeah, verb day! But happy with the work.