About

Finnish IRL exists because of one moment. You can read a letter from Kela, you passed the course, and then somebody at the next desk says something to a colleague and you catch one word in five.

That is not a vocabulary problem. Finnish teaching runs on kirjakieli, the written standard, and almost nobody speaks it. Minä becomes mä, olen becomes oon, menemme becomes mennään. Someone with a B1 certificate can genuinely lose a conversation about lunch.

So every word card here puts the two forms side by side. 23 of the 49 published so far carry a written form, and each of those shows the contrast explicitly rather than mentioning it in a footnote.

How a word gets made

Almost every one started as something overheard and not understood - on the tram, in a coffee room, in a group chat late at night. It gets written down, checked against how people actually speak, and then sourced properly.

Every page carries real references, and at least one of them has to be something other than a dictionary. Usually that is Kotus, the Institute for the Languages of Finland, or VISK, the reference grammar - which, unlike a dictionary of standard Finnish, actually documents the spoken forms. Writing usage out of a definition is how you end up asserting a folk etymology with a straight face.

What this is not

• Not a YKI course. There are no grammar drills and no practice exams here, and no claim about anybody's pass rate. What the site covers is the comprehension half - which is a real half of that test, and not the whole of it.
• Not pan-Nordic. Finnish is not a Scandinavian language. It is Finno-Ugric, its nearest large relative is Estonian, and it shares almost no vocabulary with Swedish or Norwegian. "Learn Scandinavian" content is a different subject.
• Not a promise that you will speak. Finns switch to English the moment you hesitate, which means practice at producing Finnish is genuinely scarce here. What is unlimited is practice at understanding it. The site is built around the half you can get without anyone's cooperation.

On AI

Partly, and it is better to say so than to pretend otherwise. AI helps with research and with getting a first draft down. Then it gets rewritten, checked against real usage and against Kotus, and drafts that read like a translation engine get binned rather than patched. A card that is slightly off is worse than no card, because you would go and repeat it.

The pictures are made the same way. Every card and scene is generated to a written brief, then picked over, corrected and composed here - we do not present them as drawn by hand, and each file carries the standard IPTC tag that says it was machine-made, so anything reading the file can tell. The photographs are the opposite case: real documentary work by named photographers, credited under the picture. If a card and a photo sit on the same page, one of them is evidence and the other is not.

Native speakers send corrections and those go straight into the pages. It is easily the most useful mail that arrives - moi@finnishirl.com.

Elsewhere

The social accounts are not up yet. When they are, they will be linked from the footer rather than announced here. Until then the newsletter and the word-of-the-day feed are the two ways to get a word a day without visiting.

Borrowed work

Almost everything you see here is drawn for this site - the card art, the frames, the rules, the marks. Four things are not, and this is where they get their credit.

The little glyphs on the word, situation and article filters come from two free icon sets: Doodle Icons by Khushmeen Sidhu, and Pepicons Pencil by CyCraft Design, used under CC BY 4.0. The display lettering is Cabin Sketch under the SIL Open Font License, and the body face is Mulish.

The photographs are documentary work under free licences, and each one carries its photographer and licence in the caption underneath it rather than in a list here, because a credit three pages away from the picture is not really a credit.

Who

Andrey the Nomad - one person, no team. Finnish passport, a great deal of time spent not understanding Finnish, and a list of words that got comprehensively out of hand. The site is operated by Data Sauna LLC.