Question for students who have recently *learned* finnish

[questione2]

That is, learned with a capital *L*. You can speak, and more importantly, you can listen and understand >95% of what is being said.

What was your method for learning vocab?

Did you use any tools? What would you say were your top 3 resources for learning words and getting them to gel?

How many words a day did you try to learn?

Kiitti

[Hank W.]

What would you say were your top 3 resources for learning words

1. the first 10 years in Finland...
2. another 10 years in Finland...
3...

[questione2]

What would you say were your top 3 resources for learning words

1. the first 10 years in Finland...
2. another 10 years in Finland...
3...

Totta, but there has to be some methods to speed up the process.

[sinikettu]

Firstly I would say that your 95% is a bit ambitious..
I would guess that I "understand" about 60% and fill in the gaps with guesses based on "understanding" enough to do so...That is if the Finns actualy want me to understand.

My tool/resource for vocabulary is my Nokia 9300.
It has a nice bit of 3rd party SW ...

http://sdict.com/en/

Also works on S60..

It has a fast Finn/Eng..Eng/Finn search function so if I hear, or want a new word ...it usualy finds it, or gets close enough to add/remove the case ending.
I then use the 9300 "note" facility to record it..so that pops up every time that I open the phone. (I have currently 3 new words on this pop up note)...when I am happy that it has been digested..I delete that word from my note.

[enk]

What was your method for learning vocab?

Read everything I could see (including road signs, placenames are
a wealth of vocab) and amused children in the kiddy section of Seinäjoki
library by asking them what words meant And I read a lot of
short articles in newspapers, the personal ads (esp. the ones in City-lehti
were amusing: I was totally drunk on 8.3. or maybe it was 9.3. and I
think it was Silja Line, but am not sure. I saw you smile at me, you had
on a brown shirt, or was it pants. But contact me, you're the love of
my life!

Did you use any tools? What would you say were your top 3 resources for learning words and getting them to gel?

No tools beyond the ones above and my in-laws. It's too boring
to go through lists of words, and my desire to talk as much in
Finnish as I do in English probably outdid any desire to not learn
the language

If you want to call it a tool, I played a lot of board games in
Finnish (scrabble, pictionary, etc.) with Finns with the only
additional rule being that I could look up the word in a bilingual
dictionary if I didn't know it. This worked fine until we got to a
Finnish word that a Finn didn't know and he wanted my dictionary .

How many words a day did you try to learn?

Never bothered to try and learn a certain amount of words a day
because IMO that is the quickest way to kill any desire to learn
a language.

-enk

[enk]

Firstly I would say that your 95% is a bit ambitious..

Why would it be?

-enk

[questione2]

...snip...

Thanks.

How did you get over the "hump"?

Did you just delve into articles and read and read and read?

Did you sit with a dictionary and look up words as they came? Did you try to memorize them then and there? And then if you forgot them, so be it, you'd just look it up again later?

I guess my question is, you must have internalized the words somehow, but how?

[enk]

How did you get over the "hump"?

I actually don't know. One day I just realized I knew the language.
Maybe when my Finnish friends started coming to me to ask
Finnish words

Did you just delve into articles and read and read and read?

Only things that interested me. And I would try to find it myself first
and if I couldn't, then I'd ask someone. It became rather like a game:
if the form is this, what word could it come from and why? I like
games, so this was a good approach for me. Plus I learned to
speak Finnish in Ostrobothnia, so I had to internalize rules rather
quickly as to how to get the kirjakieli form of words out of what
people were saying if I wanted to look them up. For instance:

Someone uses the word:

jaharata

I know it's a verb by the -ta on the end, I know that in Ostrobothnia
they replace -d- with -r- and they like to stick extra vowels in after -h-
(most times it's a repeat of the verb in front of the -h-), so I would find
the kirjakieli form:

jahdata (to hunt, chase, etc.)

Once I internalized those, then it was easy to use it for other words:
ihiminen (-->ihminen), kahavi (-->kahvi), kahavila (-->kahvila), etc.

I did the same thing with grammar rules, sentence structure, etc.
And I tried to produce as much Finnish as possible, but also trying
to not get upset if something didn't go right. If I couldn't think of
how to say something, I thought of a different way of saying it.
Same thing with words (which is why sometimes my ex's family
uses the word 'epähyvä', which came about at a time when I couldn't
remember the word for 'huono' )

I also listend to horrendous amounts of radio station blather in the
background. That I didn't bother to try and analyze or figure out
what was being said, but obviously my brain was sucking it in.

Did you sit with a dictionary and look up words as they came?

Sometimes, sometimes I would write them down or sometimes
I would play another game: try to remember the word until I find
a dictionary

And then if you forgot them, so be it, you'd just look it up again later?

I look up words as much as I need to. If I forget about it, I don't
berate myself because I've looked it up already and forgotten it,
I just look it up again.

I guess my question is, you must have internalized the words somehow, but how?

My FIL's theory was that I have a linguistic sponge for a brain.

-enk

[questione2]

I also listend to horrendous amounts of radio station blather in the
background. That I didn't bother to try and analyze or figure out
what was being said, but obviously my brain was sucking it in.

I've heard differing opinions on this. I've been told not to do it, because I will become used to hearing "garble" and my brain will automatically shut it out.

You seem to suggest it really works.

How long would you say it was before you felt really comfortable in finnish?

[nismo]

I'm with Sini on this one - I can conversate quite well, but I do fill in a lot of blanks if I'm talking to someone I don't know, especially the other half's older relatives who tend to mumble and talk to you when facing away so it's hard enough to hear anyway.

I tried the tapes from the library early on, but that kind of learning doesn't suit me at all and I forgot for a while about actively learning. Then after a couple of years watching TV and listening to Finnish music, I found that I could understand more and more, and I think it was this that made the difference. The first song I heard that made me want to listen to Finnish music was Juice Leskinen's Eesti (On My Mind), nice tune, a little bit of English and the *giggle* use of a curse word! Then I found some Leevi and Hector etc and that made me want to understand what they were singing. I guess this is helped by the fact that I'm a very lyrical person, that is, the kind of music I listen to is heavily lyric focused, not that I generlly speak lyrically!

Then there was that embarrasing moment, again early on, when I was buying flowers and out of courtesy I asked the woman in Finnish if she spoke English - her reply was that this was Finland and no she doesn't. So, for the first time I had to deal with the situation entirely in Finnish. Made me realise that I'd better learn something to get along in everyday life and to talk to my girlfriend's father who can maybe pronounce "car" very badly at best!

These days, the last few people I have met and talked to in the street have thought that I was Finnish. Not bad at all for a lazy guy like me!

[marsilainen]

Hi,

I don't fit the criteria for replying to this post... I've only been learning Finnish for about 2 months and so obviously I know very little...

But if your interest is mainly in vocab, I didn't see anyone else mention:
http://www.finnishschool.com/

In the 2 months that I've been learning, I've learned around 500 words by using that website, which I consider to be fairly good progress...

Hope it helps,
Matt

[questione2]

Hi,

I don't fit the criteria for replying to this post... I've only been learning Finnish for about 2 months and so obviously I know very little...

But if your interest is mainly in vocab, I didn't see anyone else mention:
http://www.finnishschool.com/

In the 2 months that I've been learning, I've learned around 500 words by using that website, which I consider to be fairly good progress...

Hope it helps,
Matt

I don't like finnish school because:
1) It doesn't allow me to use my own word lists.
2) It doesn't keep track of how long it's been since I've done old word lists. Older words should have some sort of a priority to make sure I still remember them.

I found it useful for the first couple hundred words, but after that its fecundity was markedly diminished.

[Rosamunda]

If you are trying to learn words from lists then chances are you do not need 80% of them, so it is not an efficient way of learning. If you like rote-learning then memorising sentences is maybe a more efficient method. That way you are not only learning the meaning of individual words but ALSO how to use them in dialogue (eg: which other words they fit well with and which cases they require etc etc). Example: table = pöytä and book = kirja Great! you just learnt two words. But, kirjani oli pöydällä is even more useful - you are memorising two words, a verb in the past tense, a possessive suffix, a consonant gradation and a case (adessive) suffix. Then, that phrase can be used as a template and by substituting other words you can make a helluva lot of different sentences.

Might sound muddled but that's sort of how I do it... but I am still hanging around the pre-intermediate level. My passive vocab is improving (I also read all kinds of advertisements, magazines etc) but I am a VERY hesitant speaker. I HATE making errors (definitely not a risk-taker personality) - and that's a real hindrance to making progress in active fluency. I also speak ENglish all day (that's what I do for a living) which doesn't help much

[marsilainen]

I don't like finnish school because:
1) It doesn't allow me to use my own word lists.
2) It doesn't keep track of how long it's been since I've done old word lists. Older words should have some sort of a priority to make sure I still remember them.

I found it useful for the first couple hundred words, but after that its fecundity was markedly diminished.

I'm not saying it's perfect, I doubt that any method is... I'm trying to use a multitude of different approaches myself, but finnishschool.com is still proving useful for me so far (I'm up to level 19 currently).

Each day I try to do 250-500 word practice using the levels that I've already completed before I work on any new words if I have the time.

Matt

[cybertiger]

I also listend to horrendous amounts of radio station blather in the
background. That I didn't bother to try and analyze or figure out
what was being said, but obviously my brain was sucking it in.

I suspect this is helpful once you start to pick out parts of sentences, because you will do this, and it'll remind you of words, and make sure they stick in that seive that I call my brain.

I'm sort of getting to that stage, you don't need to know much vocabulary to pick out words from what would otherwise be random gibberish, numbers, letters, and about 50-100 or so nouns should be enough to get you started.

I'm currently in the UK, and I miss picking out words from other peoples conversations. The really hard part is learning to speak when you don't know enough to string a sentence together yet. I guess my next big task is to learn by heart the rules for the various word endings. [15 endings, 5 different applications of the endings depending on the ending of the original word, some of which are very similar, it's really not that much to learn].

Speaking is much harder for me than listening, I guess I need to be less scared of making mistakes, and accept that I will sound like an immigrant just off the boat for a long while to come.

I guess the key to learning a language is to use every possible available opportunity to practice listening, spoken and written, something which is quite difficult when you're not actually in a country where the language is spoken. Learning the grammar rules isn't strictly necessary as I imagine many finns don't fully understand the word endings, they just learnt them as is. The same is very true of english grammar, this is also why many foreigners have grammar well above the standard of the averge native englishman.

I guess the answer to how long it takes is measured in terms of manhours rather than overall time. If you spend 40h a week trying to understand and speak finnish I imagine you'll be pretty close to fluent in a couple of years. I guess your ability to learn comes into it, but I'm not a big fan of the philosophy that some people find it harder to learn than others, it comes down to how serious you are about it, and just how much of your time you're willing to spend actually putting the work in. And making it "fun" to do is a big part of this, you won't manage to do 10h per week of something you're not enjoying (unless you get paid for it).

I imagine at some point you need to start thinking in finnish, otherwise you will always be a stuttering foreigner having to think, translate in your head, both ways, everything that is said, and I imagine even the finest translators cannot listen in finnish, translate to english, formulate an answer in english, and translate that answer back to finnish, and not sound like a complete foreigner.

I'm not sure how to learn to think in finnish, I guess that depends on how your mind is wired, I think mostly in pictures which helps, so when someone says lahti I see a picture of a bay, parhaps this won't be so difficult for me.

Hope some of this rambling is helpful.

Edit: As a random side note, how would yoda speak translate to finnish ?

Strong in the force, you are....
HBS, this one has...
Nowheremäki, you live in....
Find a job, you won't....

-CT