Finnish IRL

Finnish, at length

For when one card is not enough. Six questions people keep arriving with - what the textbook left out, why you cannot follow it, how to behave, how to get the errand done, what the famous words really mean, and how long any of this takes.

22 articles

200 Finnish subtitle words. Mä is not one of them
570 million tokens, and mä is not in the top 200 16 min read
Duolingo Finnish stops where real Finnish starts
Thirty-five units enter a coffee room. The textbook pronouns do not survive 10 min read
All 15 Finnish cases, ranked by real use
Fifteen cases on the chart. Three doing almost 80% of the work 6 min read
30 Finnish phrases hiding in one cup of coffee
Ordering is the easy part. Then somebody says pannaan tippumaan 6 min read
18 Finnish filler words, sorted by their job
The tiny words carrying the entire conversation 7 min read
Finnish humour is a grammar class, not a mood
Ei hassumpaa is a compliment. It means nothing more foolish 7 min read
Tuli, tuuli, tulli: three different words
Say it slower to be understood and you have just made the mistake worse 9 min read
24 Finnish questions your course never taught you
The grammar is familiar. The question arriving at full speed is not 6 min read
Finnish swearing has a grammar slot of its own
Reach for luoja to be polite and the sentence stops being Finnish 12 min read
8 kinds of Finnish TV, ranked by how much you catch
Cartoons are the standard advice, and they are harder than the news 10 min read
Finnish has no word for please. It has six moves
Saisinko does the polite work. Pliis does the begging 7 min read
Does Finnish have 40 words for snow? Not quite
We put the viral list on trial 7 min read
10 ways to say yes in Finnish, ranked by use
The subtitles say kyllä. The person in front of you says joo 8 min read
Finnish grammar is the cheap part
The same budget as Greek. The bill arrives elsewhere 11 min read
Yes, Finnish is related to Hungarian. It barely shows
A Finn understands no Hungarian. Estonian is the one that pays 9 min read
Can you work in Finland without Finnish? 2,355 ads
Seven ads in ten are in Finnish. The other three are not spread evenly 10 min read
The longest Finnish word is 61 letters of Lego
It is less a word than a very specific job advert 11 min read
The 100 verbs that carry spoken Finnish
Olla wins by 13 to 1. Then conversation gets more interesting 10 min read
Is it rude to speak bad Finnish? 93% want you to
75 per cent draw the line somewhere else entirely 8 min read
Spoken Finnish eats the endings that carry grammar
Four teachers, two registers, and nobody was lying to anybody 10 min read
What Finns actually say in the sauna, in order
The famous 3.3 million saunas trace to one unpublished bulletin 10 min read
Why Finns switch to English, and the four fixes
She gets answered in English before she has opened her mouth 11 min read

What goes here

Not travel writing, and not ten-facts-about-Finland. The six chips above are six different problems, and an article belongs to whichever one a reader would have been carrying when they went looking. Most of them are about the same thing from a different side: the language you were taught is not the one being spoken at you.

A few pieces answer two of those questions at once, so they turn up under both chips - the Helsinki slang piece is spoken Finnish and it is also one of the words Finland is known for. That is why the counts add up to more than the article total.

The word cards are the daily habit; this is where a thing gets the space it needs. If you arrived from a single word page, the words are where most of the site lives, and situations is the phrasebook side.