help with using a book

[obakesan]

I prefer liver after the summer...

Case in point, I should have put my glasses on when buying what I thought were meat patties at the grill/deli in S-market. Then in would have seen the maksa in there

[Talvi]

It's even clearer with verbs. The form I think people should concentrate on is the simple imperative and most especially not the infinitive. If you know tule, kerro, anna, etc., not only do you know many other parts of the conjugation already, but it's also easier to predict all the changes required for constructing other forms than it is if you recognize the verb primarily by its infinitive. It's simpler to predict the infinitive from that form than to predict that form from the infinitive.

Actually it’s not easier, but the problematic verbs are those of type 1 because they have a weak stem in the imperative (annaa or antaa?, kerroa or kertoa?), instead of those like pelätä-pelkään, vavista-vapisen, or korjeta-korkenen.

[Rekkari]

Actually it’s not easier, but the problematic verbs are those of type 1 because they have a weak stem in the imperative (annaa or antaa?, kerroa or kertoa?), instead of those like pelätä-pelkään, vavista-vapisen, or korjeta-korkenen.

I don't think those examples pose a problem because the infinitive form of verbs that end in two vowels (Type II verbs in FfF) is always (I believe?) strong grade. So, if I see anna for the imperative singular, I know that the 1st personal present singular is annan, which is always weak for Type II verbs. The infinitive, therefore, can only be antaa, the strong form of the two possibilities.

Whether one learns the imperative or the first infinitive as the root form probably makes little difference - it's six of one, half dozen of another. I say this because I recognize the imperative singular as the 1st personal present singular minus the final -n, which in turn comes from the infinitive stem by adding n:

antaa -> annan -> anna!
anna! -> annan -> antaa

It's the same, just backwards.

For me, I learned that there are basically six verb types, and the important variants to remember are the 1st infinitive, 1st person present singular, 3rd person past singular, and the active past participle:

1) ends in -da/-dä: voida, voin, voi, voinut
2) ends in two vowels: antaa, annan, antoi, antanut
3) ends in two consonants and a vowel: tulla, tulen, tuli, tullut
4) ends in a vowel other than i or e + -ta/-tä: haluta, haluan, halusi, halunnut
5) ends in -ita/-itä: merkitä, merkitsen, merkitsi, merkinnyt
6) ends in -eta/-etä: paeta, pakenen, pakeni, paennut

All forms can be constructed/deconstructed if you recognize the verb type, know the four parts, and know something about consonant gradation. It covers probably 99.9% of the Finnish verbs that I know - I can only think of a few that don't work out according to the rules:

olla - irregular in the 3rd person present
nähdä and tehdä - just weird
ruveta and todeta - look like Type 6 but conjugates like Type 4.

One advantage to learning the infinitive form over any other is that the infinitive is what you'll find in a dictionary. And the best method for me was to learn the six verb types and their four principle parts. All other forms easily follow.

[jahasjahas]

I hope nobody wastes their brain power on learning "korjeta-korkenen", since this is the first time I've heard of the word. Might not be the most useful piece of vocabulary.

[AldenG]

It's more than only consonant gradation that led me to that conclusion, although even that is not the 50-50 proposition you might think at first, either.

The simple imperative form is just closer to almost everything useful than the 1st infinitive is.

The only reason the 1st infinitive is the cornerstone of verb organization in Finnish reference materials is foreign academic tradition. In other languages, the infinitive (who knew there could be so many?) is the simplest and most representative form of the verb. But in Finnish it is neither simplest nor most representative -- it's a construction, and in fact, Finnish infinitives as a group are clearly the most complicated of the verb forms.

My point also reflects how the Finnish-comfortable brain stores information about the language. And the sooner you train your brain into that configuration, the sooner you get comfortable using Finnish. Configuration of brain reflexes is the ultimate goal of most language study, excepting only the people who are more interested in comparative philology than in being able to use a language. Nobody who speaks Finnish easily will ordinarily make a sentence or phrase by first considering an infinitive and then rapidly or even subconsciously computing how to turn it into another form. That's just not how language reflexes work. Instead word forms spring to mind as part of contextual sentence fragments. Look closely at how you put sentences together in your native language, though if it's English, it's hard to recognize how your mind wants to deal with inflections. The closest thing you have to look at is prepositions.

You'd almost certainly study mennä at some point, and possibly one day get around to pieli. Never in a lifetime, I suspect, would you spontaneously get around to combining them into meni pieleen. In hindsight the atomic approach appears to me the least productive approach one could ever imagine.

You see these people studying bilingual lists of 1st infinitives on flashcard sites; and with many verbs, they're not even sure what the first person singular is!! That borders on insanity. But it sort of epitomizes where Finnish instruction for foreigners went wrong in the first place.

You don't learn to dance ballet by attending anatomical dissections or lectures on anatomy or biomechanics. Nor do the foreigners who've become easily conversational in Finnish appear to be the ones who most intensively studied theory.

But that's at least a 30-year-old old rant now. I haven't been the first and I won't be the last to lament the thoroughly proven inefficacy of the academic approach that dominates the teaching of Finnish to foreigners. Nor the smartest to do so. When so few have heeded blue-ribbon panels, who's going to listen to me?

Of course you have to learn the language with the materials you have available, not the ones that only ought to exist. But two things you CAN do are begin to organize your brain around truly representative and most frequently used forms of substantives and verbs. Nominative and 1st infinitive don't really seem to qualify on either count.

[AldenG]

Since you appear to be analytical by nature, my best advice is to spend maybe a couple of intensive months studying grammar to get an overview, demystify it, and get it out of your system.

Then start locating, reading, discussing, re-reading, and making new sentences out of the most readable "real Finnish" you can find. If you can find materials with glossaries, that would be superb. You could preview the vocabulary you'd be reading and it's a lot easier than running a lot of vocabulary through Wiktionary.

Save phrases and constructs you see repeated. Review them often. Occasionally go back and see what the grammar books say but don't get mired in them. Learning about Finnish is no substitute for actually learning Finnish. After the initial orientation, grammar study should be what-you-need-when-you-need-it. It's better to get what you're studying at the moment really right than to know a lot of other stuff. Remember that all humans are born with (and to a large extent retain) a phenomenal ability to imitate but only a minority of us have analytical minds. And even for those of us who are naturally analytical, a second language doesn't originate in that part of the mind. The analytical mind can be every bit as much a hinder as a help, maybe even more hinder than help.

An approach I've suggested to others is reading the same material in Finnish and in translation, page by page. I don't think it matters that much whether the Finnish is the original or the translation. What really helps at first is simple language, as in for instance Hemingway. Maybe Andre Brink if he's still available in both languages in Finland. Sometimes read the Finnish first, sometimes the other language. Don't just slog straight through but re-read previous days' materials to consolidate your gains. Visualizing the meaning while you re-read the sentences helps embed the Finnish in your mind. You're trying to reach a point where the Finnish no longer means English words to you but has inherent meaning of its own in your brain.

I think Sinuhe, Egyptiläinen was my third book. (I believe the first two were some kind of "simple Finnish.") Unfortunately it was so interesting and appealing that I wasn't as systematic as I ought to have been. I kept wanting to see what the next page said, so I did very little review or consolidation and I'm certain that slowed down my overall learning. Nor had I caught on to the idea of alternating Finnish and English. I just looked up or asked about what I didn't understand. But fortunately, that book has an unusual amount of repetition that somewhat made up for my laziness.

Sinuhe is too heavy a project for most people to tackle early on. I was exceptionally motivated and have a sense of humor quite compatible with the author's. But if you find something that speaks to you the way that did to me, motivation is one of the most significant factors in learning anything.

[Rekkari]

You're absolutely right about the atomic approach to language study not being sufficient, but I do think it's valuable and even perhaps necessary in small doses, especially in the beginning. I've never been very good at rote memorization. To compensate, I've become fairly good at finding and utilizing patterns that allow me to reduce the large and seemingly unrelated into small and more digestible sets of rules. It's the way my mind works, I suppose. With Finnish, I needed just such a system to keep from going insane trying to understand and remember the seemingly infinite ways Finnish words mutate. Understanding Finnish grammar and studying vocabulary lists of words along with their fundamental stems certainly helped me make sense of it all while greatly reducing the load on my admittedly poor memory.

I remember a time, after many years of studying Finnish off and on, when I knew perhaps 1500 words and could conjugate and decline them endlessly in all their glory. But I struggled to put coherent sentences together and my listening comprehension was non-existent. I had spent too much time looking at a book and practically none actually speaking and listening to Finnish. I'm still struggling (does it ever get easy?), but now I get my vocabulary from Finnish internet radio and associate the new words with sentences and phrases in which I hear them. Now my head is full of meaningful constructions like Maanantaiaamuna krapula ja vapina tuijotan vessan seinään. and Minä lähden Pohjois Karjalaan!. (Today marks 10 year since Gösta Sundqvist's untimely death, BTW).

Then start locating, reading, discussing, re-reading, and making new sentences out of the most readable "real Finnish" you can find. If you can find materials with glossaries, that would be superb. You could preview the vocabulary you'd be reading and it's a lot easier than running a lot of vocabulary through Wiktionary.

Very good advice. I study Aamulehti in the morning, listen to RadioNova at work during the day, and read Apua, merirosvoja! and Seitsemän koira veljestä by Mauri Kunnas in the evenings. Not exactly Hemmingway, but it's a start, I suppose...

[Talvi]

Actually it’s not easier, but the problematic verbs are those of type 1 because they have a weak stem in the imperative (annaa or antaa?, kerroa or kertoa?), instead of those like pelätä-pelkään, vavista-vapisen, or korjeta-korkenen.

I don't think those examples pose a problem because the infinitive form of verbs that end in two vowels (Type II verbs in FfF) is always (I believe?) strong grade. So, if I see anna for the imperative singular, I know that the 1st personal present singular is annan, which is always weak for Type II verbs. The infinitive, therefore, can only be antaa, the strong form of the two possibilities.

No, you can’t always find the strong grade when you know the weak grade because if a consonant like nn, mm, ll, rr, v… appears in the weak grade, the strong grade can be either the same, or nt, mp, lt, rt, p…, that’s why you can’t always easily deduce the conjugation stem from the infinitive in some verb types (ruveta → rupean, but hävitä → häviän); and for exactly the same reason you can’t always go from the imperative to the infinitive in verbs ending in two vowels. For instance kiellä → kieltää, but salli → sallia.

If you want one basic form for all verbs from which you can deduce most of the other forms, it should be a form where the strong grade appears for all verbs, for instance the third or fourth infinitive, but since most forms use either the stem of the first infinitive or of the the first person singular (or second person imperative), it’s simpler to learn those rather than another infinitive.

[Talvi]

My point also reflects how the Finnish-comfortable brain stores information about the language. And the sooner you train your brain into that configuration, the sooner you get comfortable using Finnish. Configuration of brain reflexes is the ultimate goal of most language study, excepting only the people who are more interested in comparative philology than in being able to use a language. Nobody who speaks Finnish easily will ordinarily make a sentence or phrase by first considering an infinitive and then rapidly or even subconsciously computing how to turn it into another form. That's just not how language reflexes work. Instead word forms spring to mind as part of contextual sentence fragments. Look closely at how you put sentences together in your native language, though if it's English, it's hard to recognize how your mind wants to deal with inflections. The closest thing you have to look at is prepositions.

It’s not because the process has become completely automatized that we don’t do it. To acquire automatisms, you have to practice and repeat, it doesn’t matter if you are learning a language, math, music or a sport.

You'd almost certainly study mennä at some point, and possibly one day get around to pieli. Never in a lifetime, I suspect, would you spontaneously get around to combining them into meni pieleen. In hindsight the atomic approach appears to me the least productive approach one could ever imagine.

Well, you can’t learn idiomatic expressions without seeing them first. Really, I don’t think the atomic approach you speak of is used for any language other than Latin and ancient Greek (where it doesn’t work). There is a lot of middle ground between learning grammar rather than the language (as is usually done in ancient languages) and not studying grammar at all.

You don't learn to dance ballet by attending anatomical dissections or lectures on anatomy or biomechanics.

No but I’m sure you spend hours of practice doing repetitive exercises and decomposing your moves. That’s what learning grammar is comparable to.

But two things you CAN do are begin to organize your brain around truly representative and most frequently used forms of substantives and verbs. Nominative and 1st infinitive don't really seem to qualify on either count.

35.24 % of nominit were in the nominative singular in the Helsingin Sanomat during the first half of 1997, it’s not negligible. But anyway the nominative singular and first infinitive are often the only forms you find in bilingual dictionaries so if you don’t learn what to do from them, whether you like it or not, you can’t go far.

[Rekkari]

Talvi wrote:
No, you can’t always find the strong grade when you know the weak grade because if a consonant like nn, mm, ll, rr, v… appears in the weak grade, the strong grade can be either the same, or nt, mp, lt, rt, p…, that’s why you can’t always easily deduce the conjugation stem from the infinitive in some verb types (ruveta → rupean, but hävitä → häviän); and for exactly the same reason you can’t always go from the imperative to the infinitive in verbs ending in two vowels. For instance kiellä → kieltää, but salli → sallia.

Well, ruveta is irregular, as I pointed out earlier. But you're right about hävitä and sallia. The former I would have classified as Type 5 (ends in ita/itä and would think hävitä, hävitsen, hävitsi, hävinnyt. And sallia works going forward from the infinitive: sallia, sallin, salli, sallinut but would cause confusion if trying to work backwards from the imperative: salli > sallin > sallia? or saltia?. Clearly my rules don't always work. But for every violating verb you find, I'll give you 50 that do conform.

I posted that my rules worked for 99.9% of the verbs I know. I'll add hävitä and sallia to the exceptions list and restate my compliance rate: 99.5%

[AldenG]

If you want one basic form for all verbs from which you can deduce most of the other forms, it should be a form where the strong grade appears for all verbs, for instance the third or fourth infinitive, but since most forms use either the stem of the first infinitive or of the the first person singular (or second person imperative), it’s simpler to learn those rather than another infinitive.

I've left the wrong impression if you think I believe in choosing any one verb form to learn as a basis for applying transformations. I no longer believe in focusing on lexically transforming verb forms at all (not much, anyway) -- delete the r, add the t, do such-and-such if it's like so-and-so else go with the usual -nut. It's a waste of time trying to do consciously and analytically what the subconscious mind does so much better in a natural context.

So instead I would focus on learning or teaching verb forms in context and correctly transforming the contexts (phrases, idioms) while simply knowing the verb forms for each context. Before long you will recognize which known verb another verb most resembles. You won't have to consciously do things to it. Learn a handful of paradigms in realistic usage contexts and train your brain to recognize where a new application is like an old one.

It's much more useful to practice one sentence or a handful of sentences with 20 different verbs in the same form than it is to practice one verb in 20 different forms disconnected from any sentence. The former resembles how the mind spontaneously retrieves information in real-life contexts. The latter resembles too much classroom instruction.

But the fact remains that there is essentially a heavily used biological 'hook' in our brains for 'kerro' that doesn't exist as strongly for 'kertoa' or other infinitives. At that level, the verb is kerro while kertoa is just a peripheral form of it. (I'm not talking about the essentially trivial rr/rt distinction but about the infinitive ending and the meaning.) That's why we got 'en kerro' instead of 'en kertoa'.

Consonant gradation only looks like a big hurdle if you try to learn it reductively and analytically. Learn it gradually by analogy and it flows pretty easily.

One way I have summarized verbs in the past is like this.

Code: Select all

kerro/n (kertoo)      kerroi/n (kertoi)     kertonut / kertoneet
kerrotaan             kerrottiin            kerrottu

kertokaa (kerro)      kertoisi/n            kertone/n
kerrottakoon          kerrottaisiin         kerrottaneen

kertoa                kertoakse-            like sanoa

kertova               kertoma- (minen)      kertoe/ssa
kerrottava                                  kerrottae/ssa

(I would have bolded kerro/n (kertoo) and kertoa if I could have done it while maintaining the tabular format.)

It encapsulates nearly all the information contained in a Wiktionary Finnish verb conjugation, but without hiding the forest behind the trees. Of course you can only really remember these forms if you learn them in sentences or at least phrases that have meaning to you.

It's much more of an associative organization than an analytical one, not strictly symmetrical. You can dish it out a few lines at a time (not necessarily in the order shown) as your understanding (or your student's) expands. One can certainly ask, then, why lines 3 and 4 appear so early. But on the other hand they summarize the most uncomplicated forms, easily touched on briefly and then moved on. Or they could be moved last. I think the reason I put them 3rd and 4th back when I devised this paradigm was because of their (imperfect but adequate) structural similarity to lines 1 and 2. Plus it makes the first half of the table cover all the finite forms while the second half covers the others.

Also note that any second line of a pair always consists of passive forms, which I tried to associate closely to their active counterparts.

Grammatical names are sometimes helpful but often a distraction. I think it's much more important to associate each form to its actual meaning than to associate it with a grammatical name. Looking at the form and thinking of sentences with it is likely the best way to build an association with its meaning.

The organization is an outgrowth of all the years I spent making materials for interactive teaching and real-time performance-support. Instead of organizing information along formal taxonomic lines I try to organize it according to what someone needs and when they need it, and especially which things are most similar to each other. Like anything, of course, you can over-analyze organizational structure. The important thing is to have some structure and to get to know it on an intuitive level. Language is all about recognition and imitation (analogy). Analytical thinking should be the last resort in assembling a sentence, the thing you use if you're all out of relevant analogies. (Among other things, analogy is the way that languages evolve but also the way that they resist DEvolution. Imitation and analogy truly are the deepest essence of language.) That was hard for me to learn because it's the opposite of how my mind works most easily, and a traditional approach would have said I should have gone with my intrinsic "learner style," as I did in the beginning.

Yes, there are rules that can correctly say which grade to use in which form, but in the end learning such rules and learning to apply them correctly is more work than learning to recognize the paradigms. And it's an artificial activity disconnected from how the mind retrieves language information in actual use.

If you learn to correctly use a fairly large number of verbs with a small or minimal number of adjectives, nouns, adverbs, postpositions, etc, you'll finally 'get' the language and easily be able to expand your vocabulary from there. It's all about the verb-plus-case constructions. That's what people stumble on the most. If you understand verbs and have experience reading diverse sentence structures with words you understand, there's a strange way you can easily "recognize" a sentence and get a certain kind of meta-meaning from it even when you don't know most of the words in the sentence. It's a bit like reading Jabberwocky, I suppose.

[AldenG]

A succinct way to put a related point is:

I believe it's quite easy to teach people to understand and construct sentences like:

Jorma lähti kauppaan.
Jorma lähti uimaan.

-- UNLESS you start "explaining" the grammatics of how and why it works or delving into tables. At that point you and your students are screwed, because the more you explain the less they'll understand and the more distracted and confused they'll become. Just spend an entire lesson practicing these two models with -ssa, -sta, and -**n and a good variety of representative nouns and verbs. Establish the pattern and save the exceptions for another day.

This is one example of pretty much what the experts have been saying for 30 years or more, but it doesn't seem like many curriculum designers or teachers have been listening.

If someone then says "Jorma meni kerromaan äidille" my response will be "Excellent! (And by the way it's 'kertomaan')" because the main thing is that that person is already starting to think in Finnish, unlike the guy who gets all the individual forms right but uses that knowledge to construct word-for-word English sentences in Finnish. And Finnish with little mistakes like consonant gradation is usually much more flowing and easier to understand than Finnish with fractured word order and non-idiomatic case constructions.

(In fact, the local cases with the -ma- infinitive forms are considerably simpler to master than the local cases in most other contexts. Although -ma- is omnipresent in everyday language, in instruction it tends to be saved too late as a "advanced" topic. But it's only difficult if the teacher makes it difficult.)

[obakesan]

Instead of organizing information along formal taxonomic lines I try to organize it according to what someone needs and when they need it, and especially which things are most similar to each other.

.

Why the hell aren't you running things here!