Different plural cats

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tas
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Nov 03, 2014 5:18 am

Different plural cats

Post by tas » Sat Dec 06, 2014 4:54 am

Hi,

I'm wondering why (atleast what I read) you say:
Kissoja for plural cats,
not kissat?

and for example minulla on kaksi kissaa is from what I read, the correct way to say that.
Why is it not kissat or kissoja? Where can I read about this? Thank you :)

Also I'm wondering if someone know a site that lists items like table, chair, apple etc with the proper translation for those as I don't fully trust Google Translate.
Or what is the search terms for finding it?

Thanks



Different plural cats

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SecretCode
Posts: 146
Joined: Fri Dec 27, 2013 8:01 pm

Re: Different plural cats

Post by SecretCode » Sat Dec 06, 2014 3:55 pm

To answer your last question, Wikisanakirja, vapaa sanakirja is my go-to site for word forms. Google Translate is not much use for a beginner in Finnish!

kissa – Wikisanakirja shows that kissat is the nominative (subject) plural, kissoja is the partitive plural, and kissojen kissoissa kissoista kissoihin kissoilla kissoilta kissoille kissoina kissoiksi kissoitta and kissoin are some of the other plural forms. As for how you learn what they all mean ... :?: :wink:
Image

007
Posts: 632
Joined: Wed Sep 02, 2009 3:01 pm

Re: Different plural cats

Post by 007 » Sat Dec 06, 2014 5:01 pm

tas wrote:Hi,

I'm wondering why (atleast what I read) you say:
Kissoja for plural cats,
not kissat?

and for example minulla on kaksi kissaa is from what I read, the correct way to say that.
Why is it not kissat or kissoja? Where can I read about this? Thank you :)

Also I'm wondering if someone know a site that lists items like table, chair, apple etc with the proper translation for those as I don't fully trust Google Translate.
Or what is the search terms for finding it?

Thanks
For now, just know that kissat, kissoja, kissaa, kissa -> Image

you can work on those grammars later. What I think you (or any beginners) need is Vocabularies to begin with such as English version or Finnish version. ok here's one for kissa (inflection is somewhere in the middle but do you really wanna know how to use them properly at such an early stage? )
“Go where you are celebrated – not tolerated."
"Aina, kun opit uuden sanan, opettele samalla sen monikko!"

tas
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Nov 03, 2014 5:18 am

Re: Different plural cats

Post by tas » Sat Dec 06, 2014 8:36 pm

007 wrote:
tas wrote:Hi,

I'm wondering why (atleast what I read) you say:
Kissoja for plural cats,
not kissat?

and for example minulla on kaksi kissaa is from what I read, the correct way to say that.
Why is it not kissat or kissoja? Where can I read about this? Thank you :)

Also I'm wondering if someone know a site that lists items like table, chair, apple etc with the proper translation for those as I don't fully trust Google Translate.
Or what is the search terms for finding it?

Thanks
For now, just know that kissat, kissoja, kissaa, kissa -> Image

you can work on those grammars later. What I think you (or any beginners) need is Vocabularies to begin with such as English version or Finnish version. ok here's one for kissa (inflection is somewhere in the middle but do you really wanna know how to use them properly at such an early stage? )
Thank you, I've been using that site alot for learning words and the suffixes, that's what I've been practicing for a long time now, I know how each word that I've learned is used for suffix like syön, olen syönut, söin, söisin, I learn that for the words I learn so I know how to use them. What I've not learned much yet is the usage of for example, kissat, kissoja, kissaa, kissa, and (I made another thread) about the endings why you say kiitos kahvista when -sta is "from inside of" like kaupasta but that's in another thread. I'm going to try and learn those parts now. I'm not too sure about the grammatical names of everything, if I learn the ending of a word and what situation it works in I will be ok I think. Thank you for your reply :)

007
Posts: 632
Joined: Wed Sep 02, 2009 3:01 pm

Re: Different plural cats

Post by 007 » Sat Dec 06, 2014 9:21 pm

tas wrote:if I learn the ending of a word and what situation it works in I will be ok I think.
and that's the hardest part to crack, I am afraid, second only to dialects. Have you heard of a joke Image
“Go where you are celebrated – not tolerated."
"Aina, kun opit uuden sanan, opettele samalla sen monikko!"

tas
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Nov 03, 2014 5:18 am

Re: Different plural cats

Post by tas » Sat Dec 06, 2014 9:56 pm

007 wrote:
tas wrote:if I learn the ending of a word and what situation it works in I will be ok I think.
and that's the hardest part to crack, I am afraid, second only to dialects. Have you heard of a joke
hehe I've seen that but how many of them are used in the daily language? Hopefully not too many.
And well so far I've learned that:
Kiitos kahvista = thanks for the coffee
Kaupasta = From (inside) the store and thanks for the deal? I think I read it in the other thread

If I learn what more ways each ending can be used in, I can probably get an ok understanding of what the sentence means if I see what word is infront of it.
But I'm not finding alot of examples on this, any idea where I can?

edit: just want to add that those words in the picture has the koirani koirasi koiransa koiramme etc so its not different meanings for the word itself I guess :mrgreen:

007
Posts: 632
Joined: Wed Sep 02, 2009 3:01 pm

Re: Different plural cats

Post by 007 » Sat Dec 06, 2014 11:03 pm

What u r looking for is called 'cases'. Finnish cases, I think there Wikipedia page dedicated for that.
“Go where you are celebrated – not tolerated."
"Aina, kun opit uuden sanan, opettele samalla sen monikko!"

AldenG
Posts: 3353
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 3:11 am

Re: Different plural cats

Post by AldenG » Sun Dec 07, 2014 1:23 am

tas wrote:about the endings why you say kiitos kahvista when -sta is "from inside of" like kaupasta but that's in another thread.
Finnish is not about the study of words and how you combine them. It is the study of phrases and how they adapt and fit together.

You really can't understand it atomistically the way your question suggests. You can't ignore the tiniest elements but neither can you succeed if they are your primary focus.

The problem is that you have read a description of "what the elative case means." The entire premise of a phrase like "what the elative case means" is fatally misguided. By itself the elative case means nothing. It only begins to take on meaning in various different contexts and phrases, and its meaning varies. So someone said the thing that was easy to describe, "out of" and thus gave advice that is only trivially useful in a handful of spatial contexts but says nothing very useful about how the language works. You can only rationalize after-the-fact why a case appears in a certain context. There is no set of rules about cases you can learn out of context, without a vocabulary of phrases, that will make you choose the correct case most of the time.

You shouldn't be choosing a case to go with words you've already selected. You should be choosing a phrase that says the idea you have in mind.

If you absolutely must think that way, then you have to learn to think that "thanks out of the coffee" makes sense, which in a twisted way it does. (Thanks about the coffee is closer to the everyday usage of elative.) But that's not how it works in native speakers' brains, even if some of them end up translating to English that way. They build Finnish sentences out of pieces, all right, but the pieces that percolate into consciousness are entire phrases. This is true in other languages, too, but because Finnish is so highly inflected, it has an uncommonly large universe of potential combinations of smallest pieces into meaningless sentences. Unlike say English or Swedish, most of what you say by putting words together and guessing at cases will at best be incorrect. At worst it will be bizarrely meaningless and people will really scratch their heads about what you might have been thinking.

Seriously: you have to find phrases and study how they work without trying deconstruct and rebuild all their component pieces like an engineer. (Engineers are notoriously attracted to this language but few do very well with it in the end, precisely because it is not a build-sentences-from-nuts-and-bolts language.) 90% of the time you spend studying cases and vocabulary alone will end up having been wasted. Spend more time on the "how" (words are normally combined) and less on the "why."
As he persisted, I was obliged to tootle him gently at first and then, seeing no improvement, to trumpet him vigorously with my horn.

tas
Posts: 9
Joined: Mon Nov 03, 2014 5:18 am

Re: Different plural cats

Post by tas » Sun Dec 07, 2014 4:42 am

AldenG wrote:text shorten
Thank you for a very useful input. I'm not sure if I fully understand, do you mean take sentences and their meaning and not taking the words and trying to make them work in other sentences? could you give me an example? thank you very much for your time :D

007
Posts: 632
Joined: Wed Sep 02, 2009 3:01 pm

Re: Different plural cats

Post by 007 » Sun Dec 07, 2014 11:21 am

tas wrote:just want to add that those words in the picture has the koirani koirasi koiransa koiramme etc so its not different meanings for the word itself I guess
the problem is rather the endings, like you've had problems with cats e.g. why not kissat but kissoja? It's very difficult to know when to use the right endings. I must admit here that I still do make lots of mistakes regarding endings (cases).

I like cats -> Minä tykkään kissoista
I have 2 cats -> Minulla on 2 kissaa
Cats are cute -> Kissat ovat söpöjä
Thousands of cats are abandoned every year -> Tuhansia kissoja hylätään vuosittain

as in the joke, In English you have a cat or cats but in Finnish you have many forms for a 'cat' word because of suffixes. The trick is to memorize the phrases like said above, to begin with. You have e.g. tykkään kissoista, kahvista, sinusta etc. Now, instead of asking why kissoista? why not kissat? why -sta? because you have read somewhere that -sta means 'from', you should just swallow it. Later, you will know that it's 'tykätä' verb that takes '-sta' ending.

Repetition is the key. When you read the texts or listen, you will come across same phrases/sentences being used and the more you are exposed to them, the more they become familiar to you, and even though at present they may not grammatically make senses to you, they will later.

However, learning grammar is good for your brain if you are into such challenges. It also helps build a solid foundation but just don't focus too much on it from the beginning. Btw, how long have you been learning Finnish and how far have you learned in terms of grammars?

Let me add again, it's not only the suffixes that make things complicated. Many a time, the word itself changes unrecognizably when it gets suffixes e.g. lain mukaan -> by law, according to law

here
laki -> law
lain -> genitive form of laki

or

kissoista -> kiss + (o)i + sta -> pl elative form of kissa
“Go where you are celebrated – not tolerated."
"Aina, kun opit uuden sanan, opettele samalla sen monikko!"

Rekkari
Posts: 57
Joined: Fri Aug 02, 2013 5:11 pm

Re: Different plural cats

Post by Rekkari » Sun Dec 07, 2014 5:11 pm

I don't want to start a raging debate here about how best to learn Finnish, but, while I agree that it's not ultimately enough for fluency, the traditional atomic approach to language learning is probably necessary, in the beginning, for most adult learners. The wholistic total immersion approach that works so effortlessly for babies simply does not work for the vast majority of adults.

I think it's generally accepted that adults, babies and young children don't acquire language in the same way. The adult brain is physiologically different and can no longer absorb, sponge like, a new language using the same tricks it did when young. Sure, there are savants that acquire language without breaking a sweat, but they are by far the exception, not the rule. Most adults, I believe, will reach fluency the quickest through a combination of both atomic and wholistic learning.

Here's what I think might work well for Finnish (24 to 42 months to fluency):

Acquire a seed vocabulary and learn the basic grammar (12 to 18 months)
  • perhaps a core vocabulary of one to two thousand words (basic nouns, verbs,
    adjectives, adverbs, etc.)
  • Learn to form and recognize the principle forms for each:
    nouns: basic, partitive singular, genitive, partitive plural (Ex. kirja,
    kirjaa, kirjan, kirjoja)
    verbs: basic, present 1st person singular, past 3rd person singular, perfect
    (Ex. puhua, puhun, puhui, puhunut)
    adjectives: basic, comparative, superlative
  • Learn the rules for consonant gradation (kk>k, tt>t, t<d, nk>ng, etc.)
  • Learn the basic cases and when to apply them
  • Learn the basic tenses and how to form them
Finnish for Foreigners I, although now somewhat dated, is still available and the best textbook I've encountered. Study it from cover to cover and you will have a solid foundation on which to build a tower toward fluency. In addition, there are many online sources for basic vocabulary. Book2 has pictures and pronunciation and would be a good supplement to FFF.

BTW, regarding the use of the elative case (-sta / -stä): coming out of something or somewhere is only one of the uses covered by the case. FFF is much more thorough and instructs on several other uses such as the topic about which something is discussed, and the object for which we thank someone (e.g., Ihmiset puhuvat säästä. = People talk about the weather; Kiitos kahvista = Thanks for the coffee).

Learn 10,000 sentences (12 to 24 months)
You can read more about it here, but the basic premise of the Method of 10,000 Sentences is that your brain builds relationships through categorization and that to become fluent in a new language your brain needs a ton (10,000) of sample sentences for processing. The goal during this phase is to fully learn and comprehend 10,000 sentences, after which, the method claims, you will be fluent. You should strive to learn perhaps 20 new sentences per day (10000/20=500 days, or ~18months). You should be able to read, write, say, and hear each sentence with understanding, concentrating NOT on a word-for-word direct translation but on the taken-as-a-whole meaning.

Yle Uutiset Selko Suomeksi is an outstanding source for sentences. The topics are current and likely to be something that you would encounter in everyday conversation in Finland. The vocabulary and grammar is purposefully kept simple and each article (typically four per day, each with 7-8 fully constructed and grammatically correct sentences) is accompanied by a downloadable mp3 recorded by a variety of native Finnish speakers, both male and female. Some speak rather slowly with exaggerated enunciation (Tuukka Lukinmaa) while others speak a bit faster (Pertti Seppä) and probably sound more normal (Jan Fredriksson). You get a variety of voices and tempo, both male and female.

I created an app with which to collect and organize Yle Uutiset sentences. Here's a screenshot with the embedded player visible:

Image

I can read and/or listen to each day's articles in the order in which Yle presented them, or skip around randomly with or without the audio enabled. The quiet mode is ideal when I'm at work and don't want to disturb others. At work I typically set it up to auto play random sentences without audio. Then, whenever I'm at my desk, I click on the 'Random' button until a sentence appears that I don't immediately understand. That becomes my 'sentence of the moment' and I repeat it over and over in my head until it makes sense.

At home each evening I download and parse the articles and chop up the mp3 file into individual sentences. Then I read, listen, repeat, and write each until it comes more or less natural. I spend approximately one hour each morning and one hour in the evening reviewing the sentences, and it has definitely improved my vocabulary and comprehension since I started doing this in August (almost 4000 sentences and counting!).

Double-clicking on a word will bring it up in Wiktionary. Highlighting a phrase or triple-clicking the sentence will bring it up in Google Translate.

Speaking of which, I think Google Translate is perfectly suitable for basic single word translations as it seldom gets it wrong. Homographs can be a problem (seal, for example, doesn't mention the animal, only the mechanical part. It's okay to blow the latter but definably not the former! :lol: ) and complex sentences are typically butchered. But coupled with Wiktionary, the two can compliment each other.

One last thing:
I wasn't aware that engineers are particularly attracted to Finnish nor that they typically don't do well in it. But it stands to reason that the very same brain wiring that makes us good engineers (e.g., logical, analytical, and objective reasoning skills) probably cripples us somewhat when learning something as subjective as a foreign language. We are much better at analyzing grammar and memorizing vocabulary!

Give an engineer a black box that does something unusual in a at-first-glance unexplainable way and it will be taken apart in short order to find out how it works. We can't help ourselves - it's just the way our minds work. We build complex systems from simpler components and deconstruct complex systems for insight and analysis. Thus our predilection for the atomic approach to language learning.

And that's all I'm going to say about that (probably). :wink:

AldenG
Posts: 3353
Joined: Wed Apr 29, 2009 3:11 am

Re: Different plural cats

Post by AldenG » Mon Dec 08, 2014 9:41 pm

FWIW I'm not advocating holistic immersion at all, but rather a carefully constructed, carefully guided approach focused on major functional building blocks and "meaning groups". That includes a seed vocabulary of words learned in controlled associative contexts, but of equal or greater importance a seed "vocabulary" of functional phrases. Cuz as you know, one can't really make up phrases based on one's native language. You have to have a vocabulary of ways that Finns express things and be able to construct a meaning out of those.

Somebody has to do a whole lot of analysis to make that work to peak effectiveness. But it normally won't be the student. The kind of holism to which I think you alluded and on the other hand atomism/reductionism are both extremes, and there are very few things in nature that work best (or even well) at either end of any spectrum you can describe.

An analogy for a scientist would be approaching Finnish more like organic chemistry, where you catalogue, categorize, and study the interactions of larger functional molecules and families (which are Finnish phrase structures), rather than atoms and orbitals, rather than trying to predict from first principles, from the attributes and behaviors of individual elements, how to construct molecules that will be functional in organic contexts. Instead you start with what actually exists in nature and how these things actually interact. The main reason that otherwise scientifically apt chem students have so much trouble with organic chem is precisely the difficulty of letting go of the atomistic approach and wrapping their heads around the functional-group approach. That, and the volume of new detail about names and behaviors. It seems so arbitrary and empirical, not nearly as neat, readily explainable, and predictable-in-advance as inorganic. So really the more you think about what makes organic chem such a hurdle, the more ways you see that it resembles learning Finnish.

Language is also rather like music, where you learn performance through emulation and adaptation faster than you learn analysis and theory.

Unfortunately another project has been consuming about 110% of my time for more than the last year and looks to do so for at least another 6 months. So for now all my work in this field is gathering dust. But I do intend to return to it and maybe even field-test some pilot classes a few years from now.
As he persisted, I was obliged to tootle him gently at first and then, seeing no improvement, to trumpet him vigorously with my horn.


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