---
title: "200 Finnish subtitle words. Mä is not one of them"
description: "We counted 570 million Finnish subtitle tokens, then checked the top 200 forms against a 780-entry Duolingo Finnish snapshot. The misses reveal a bigger trap."
type: "article"
category: "listening"
url: "https://finnishirl.com/blog/common-finnish-subtitle-words"
canonical: "https://finnishirl.com/blog/common-finnish-subtitle-words"
published: "2026-10-01"
updated: "2026-10-01"
author: "Andrey the Nomad"
site: "Finnish IRL"
license: "https://finnishirl.com/terms#ip"
---
# 200 Finnish subtitle words. Mä is not one of them
URL: https://finnishirl.com/blog/common-finnish-subtitle-words
Date: 2026-10-01
Updated: 2026-10-01
Category: listening
Keywords: most common Finnish words, Finnish frequency list, common spoken Finnish words, Duolingo Finnish vocabulary, Finnish words with English translation, puhekieli vocabulary
Summary: We counted 570 million Finnish subtitle tokens, then checked the top 200 forms against a 780-entry Duolingo Finnish snapshot. The misses reveal a bigger trap.
Quick answer:
- In the OPUS OpenSubtitles 2024 Finnish file, on is the most frequent alphabetic word form after capitalisation is merged; ei, ja, se and hän complete the top five.
- An exact-form comparison found 98 of the top 200 in a 780-entry unofficial Duolingo Finnish snapshot from January 2022. The other 102 are not automatically 102 missing concepts: many are inflections.
- The subtitle top 200 contains minä and sinä but not the everyday forms mä and sä. Subtitle Finnish is dialogue-shaped written Finnish, not a transcript of mouths.
- For listening, learn families: minä, minua and minun belong with mä, mua and mun. A bare frequency list splits one useful pattern into several ranks.
What you'll learn:
- How to read all 200 ranked forms without mistaking subtitles for a recording
- Which exact forms appear in a dated Duolingo snapshot, with the comparison rule exposed
- Why one Finnish verb can occupy a small crowd of places in a word-form ranking
- The spoken partners that turn a screen vocabulary into something you can recognise in a room
Body:
Here is the clean headline number: **98 of the 200 most frequent alphabetic word forms in Finnish OpenSubtitles 2024 appear as exact strings in the dated Duolingo snapshot we checked. 102 do not.**
That sounds like Duolingo missed half the language. It did not. Oli, olen and ollut are three forms of olla, and an exact-string audit counts them separately. The more revealing miss is not number 102. It is a two-letter word that never reaches the top 200 at all: mä.
## The top 200, with the audit attached
The ranking below comes from the OPUS OpenSubtitles 2024 Finnish monolingual frequency file. It covers 570,353,193 tokens from 139,983 subtitle documents.[^opus-data] We lowercased the supplied word forms, combined capitals with lowercase, removed punctuation and kept alphabetic tokens. **These are surface forms, not dictionary headwords.**
"In snapshot" means the same lowercase character string appears somewhere in the 780-entry third-party course snapshot. It does not mean a particular learner encountered it, and "not exact" does not mean Duolingo never teaches the underlying idea.
| Rank | Word {fi} | Working gloss | In Jan 2022 snapshot |
| ---: | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | on | is | In snapshot |
| 2 | ei | no / not | In snapshot |
| 3 | ja | and | In snapshot |
| 4 | se | it / that / he / she | In snapshot |
| 5 | hän | he / she | In snapshot |
| 6 | mitä | what | In snapshot |
| 7 | en | I do not | Not exact |
| 8 | että | that | In snapshot |
| 9 | ole | be (in a negative clause) / be! | In snapshot |
| 10 | niin | so / like that | In snapshot |
| 11 | olen | I am | In snapshot |
| 12 | mutta | but | In snapshot |
| 13 | oli | was | Not exact |
| 14 | sen | its / of that / it, him or her (object) | Not exact |
| 15 | vain | only | In snapshot |
| 16 | jos | if | Not exact |
| 17 | minä | I | In snapshot |
| 18 | tämä | this | In snapshot |
| 19 | nyt | now | In snapshot |
| 20 | voi | can / may | In snapshot |
| 21 | olet | you are | In snapshot |
| 22 | sinä | you | In snapshot |
| 23 | kun | when | In snapshot |
| 24 | sitä | it / that (partitive) | Not exact |
| 25 | kuin | as / than | In snapshot |
| 26 | he | they (people) | In snapshot |
| 27 | kaikki | all / everyone | In snapshot |
| 28 | täällä | here | Not exact |
| 29 | hänen | his / her | Not exact |
| 30 | hyvä | good | In snapshot |
| 31 | olla | to be | In snapshot |
| 32 | ovat | they are | In snapshot |
| 33 | et | you do not | Not exact |
| 34 | minun | my | Not exact |
| 35 | minua | me (partitive) | Not exact |
| 36 | onko | is it? | In snapshot |
| 37 | sitten | then | Not exact |
| 38 | miten | how | In snapshot |
| 39 | hei | hi | In snapshot |
| 40 | miksi | why | In snapshot |
| 41 | sinua | you (partitive) | Not exact |
| 42 | älä | do not | Not exact |
| 43 | kiitos | thanks | In snapshot |
| 44 | kyllä | yes / indeed | In snapshot |
| 45 | siitä | about it / from it | Not exact |
| 46 | hänet | him / her (object) | Not exact |
| 47 | sinun | your | Not exact |
| 48 | mitään | nothing / anything | In snapshot |
| 49 | mikä | which / what | In snapshot |
| 50 | pitää | must / like / hold or keep | In snapshot |
| 51 | ne | they / those | In snapshot |
| 52 | olisi | would be | Not exact |
| 53 | joka | who / which | In snapshot |
| 54 | kanssa | with | Not exact |
| 55 | tai | or | In snapshot |
| 56 | ollut | been | Not exact |
| 57 | tiedä | know (in a negative clause) / know! | Not exact |
| 58 | tässä | here / in this | In snapshot |
| 59 | häntä | him / her (partitive) | Not exact |
| 60 | jotain | something | In snapshot |
| 61 | minulle | to me | Not exact |
| 62 | minulla | I have | In snapshot |
| 63 | tuo | that over there | In snapshot |
| 64 | ehkä | maybe | In snapshot |
| 65 | minut | me (object) | Not exact |
| 66 | missä | where | In snapshot |
| 67 | anteeksi | sorry / excuse me | In snapshot |
| 68 | hyvin | well | In snapshot |
| 69 | oletko | are you? | In snapshot |
| 70 | me | we | In snapshot |
| 71 | koska | because | In snapshot |
| 72 | kuka | who | In snapshot |
| 73 | tämän | this (genitive) | Not exact |
| 74 | sinut | you (object) | Not exact |
| 75 | olemme | we are | In snapshot |
| 76 | vielä | still / yet | In snapshot |
| 77 | haluan | I want | Not exact |
| 78 | sinulle | to you | Not exact |
| 79 | jo | already | In snapshot |
| 80 | tehdä | to do | In snapshot |
| 81 | tänne | here / over here (toward this place) | Not exact |
| 82 | emme | we do not | Not exact |
| 83 | tiedän | I know | Not exact |
| 84 | meidän | our | Not exact |
| 85 | tule | come! / come (in a negative clause) | Not exact |
| 86 | selvä | clear / OK | Not exact |
| 87 | paljon | a lot | In snapshot |
| 88 | saa | may / gets | Not exact |
| 89 | anna | give! / Anna (name) | Not exact |
| 90 | eivät | they do not | Not exact |
| 91 | siellä | there | Not exact |
| 92 | tätä | this (partitive) | Not exact |
| 93 | aina | always | In snapshot |
| 94 | pois | away | In snapshot |
| 95 | ennen | before | Not exact |
| 96 | tulee | comes / will come | Not exact |
| 97 | siinä | in it / there | Not exact |
| 98 | sinulla | you have | In snapshot |
| 99 | eikö | isn't it? | Not exact |
| 100 | yksi | one | In snapshot |
### Ranks 101-200
| Rank | Word {fi} | Working gloss | In Jan 2022 snapshot |
| ---: | --- | --- | --- |
| 101 | enää | anymore | In snapshot |
| 102 | näin | like this | Not exact |
| 103 | mistä | from where | Not exact |
| 104 | takaisin | back | Not exact |
| 105 | täytyy | must | Not exact |
| 106 | juuri | just / exactly | Not exact |
| 107 | vai | or? | In snapshot |
| 108 | halua | want (in a negative clause) / want! | Not exact |
| 109 | herra | sir / Mr | In snapshot |
| 110 | no | well | In snapshot |
| 111 | kaksi | two | In snapshot |
| 112 | olin | I was | Not exact |
| 113 | pitäisi | should | Not exact |
| 114 | koko | whole / entire | In snapshot |
| 115 | te | you (plural/formal) | In snapshot |
| 116 | meillä | we have | In snapshot |
| 117 | mennä | to go | Not exact |
| 118 | joku | someone | In snapshot |
| 119 | tästä | from this | Not exact |
| 120 | hänelle | to him / her | Not exact |
| 121 | kai | probably / I suppose | In snapshot |
| 122 | tietää | to know | Not exact |
| 123 | aivan | quite / exactly | Not exact |
| 124 | siis | so / I mean / therefore | Not exact |
| 125 | koskaan | ever / never | In snapshot |
| 126 | joten | so / therefore | In snapshot |
| 127 | totta | true | Not exact |
| 128 | voin | I can | Not exact |
| 129 | kuinka | how | In snapshot |
| 130 | aika | time / quite | In snapshot |
| 131 | isä | father | In snapshot |
| 132 | ihan | quite / really | In snapshot |
| 133 | entä | what about | In snapshot |
| 134 | mene | go! / go or work (in a negative clause) | Not exact |
| 135 | siihen | into it / to it | Not exact |
| 136 | äiti | mother | In snapshot |
| 137 | mies | man | In snapshot |
| 138 | kuten | like / as | Not exact |
| 139 | vähän | a little | In snapshot |
| 140 | hyvää | good (partitive) | Not exact |
| 141 | teet | you do | Not exact |
| 142 | eikä | and not | Not exact |
| 143 | olette | you are (plural/formal) | In snapshot |
| 144 | oikein | correctly / really | In snapshot |
| 145 | voit | you can | Not exact |
| 146 | edes | even | In snapshot |
| 147 | aikaa | time (partitive) | Not exact |
| 148 | kaiken | all of it | Not exact |
| 149 | kukaan | anyone / nobody (with negation) | Not exact |
| 150 | kunnossa | all right / in working order | Not exact |
| 151 | myös | also | In snapshot |
| 152 | minusta | in my opinion / about me / from me | Not exact |
| 153 | haluat | you want | Not exact |
| 154 | todella | really | In snapshot |
| 155 | sanoi | said | Not exact |
| 156 | mukaan | along / according to | Not exact |
| 157 | noin | about / like that | Not exact |
| 158 | itse | self | Not exact |
| 159 | katso | look! | Not exact |
| 160 | sillä | because / with it | In snapshot |
| 161 | vaan | just / but | In snapshot |
| 162 | ulos | out | Not exact |
| 163 | ettei | that not | Not exact |
| 164 | taas | again | In snapshot |
| 165 | jälkeen | after | Not exact |
| 166 | auttaa | to help | In snapshot |
| 167 | tänään | today | Not exact |
| 168 | pidä | hold! / like or hold (in a negative clause) | Not exact |
| 169 | hänellä | he / she has | In snapshot |
| 170 | heidän | their | Not exact |
| 171 | kerro | tell! / tell (in a negative clause) | Not exact |
| 172 | päästä | to get / be allowed | Not exact |
| 173 | tulla | to come | Not exact |
| 174 | meitä | us | Not exact |
| 175 | sinusta | about you / from you | Not exact |
| 176 | puhua | to speak | In snapshot |
| 177 | etkö | don't you? | Not exact |
| 178 | mennään | let's go | Not exact |
| 179 | tee | do! / tea | In snapshot |
| 180 | tuli | came / fire | Not exact |
| 181 | niitä | them (partitive) | Not exact |
| 182 | liian | too | In snapshot |
| 183 | vaikka | although / even if | In snapshot |
| 184 | kotiin | home | Not exact |
| 185 | pahoillani | sorry (I am) | Not exact |
| 186 | näyttää | to show / seem | Not exact |
| 187 | muuta | other (partitive) | Not exact |
| 188 | kiinni | closed / attached | In snapshot |
| 189 | nähdä | to see | In snapshot |
| 190 | vuotta | year (partitive) | Not exact |
| 191 | ilman | without | Not exact |
| 192 | tapahtui | happened | Not exact |
| 193 | jotka | who / which (plural) | In snapshot |
| 194 | kolme | three | In snapshot |
| 195 | haluatko | do you want? | Not exact |
| 196 | sanoa | to say | In snapshot |
| 197 | tähän | to this / here | Not exact |
| 198 | heti | immediately | Not exact |
| 199 | teidän | your (plural/formal) | Not exact |
| 200 | nämä | these | In snapshot |
## The 102 "misses" are three different things wearing one badge
The exact comparison is real. Its most tempting interpretation is not.
### 1. Inflections Duolingo may teach as a family
The snapshot includes minä, but the corpus also ranks minun, minua, minulle, minut and minusta. Marking all five "not exact" proves only that an entry list is a poor proxy for everything a course lets a learner construct.
The same happens to verbs. Tulla may be learned as an infinitive while a subtitle delivers tule, tulee or tuli. Finnish makes this problem larger than English because case, person, tense and participles live on the word.
### 2. Ordinary words outside a short beginner course
Forms such as takaisin (back), heti (immediately) and kunnossa (all right) are not grammatical mirages. They are useful dialogue vocabulary absent as exact entries from this particular snapshot.
The careful phrasing matters. The My Little Word Land list says it was compiled from skill vocabulary and was complete in January 2022.[^duo-snapshot] It is not an official, current export from Duolingo. Course paths change, and the absence of a string from this file cannot support the word "never."
### 3. Spoken forms the ranking misses before Duolingo gets a chance
The subtitle file puts minä at 17 and sinä at 22. The lowercased forms mä and sä do not make the top 200. Neither do oon, mun, sun or niinku.
That is not how a room sounds. Research on Finnish teachers recorded in the early 1990s found that the same teachers used standard minä and sinä almost invariably with foreign learners, but almost never with Finnish interlocutors.[^storhammar] Subtitles are written for the eye. Even when the scene is casual, the line may be normalised on its way to the screen.
## Eight families are more useful than 200 isolated cards
| Book or subtitle form {fi} | Commonly heard partner {fi} |
| --- | --- |
| minä, minua, minun | mä, mua, mun |
| sinä, sinua, sinun | sä, sua, sun |
| olen, olet | oon, oot |
| hän | se |
| he | ne |
| tämä, tämän | tää, tän |
| oletko (sinä), onko | ootko / ootsä / ooksä, onks |
| me olemme, me menemme | me ollaan, me mennään |
The pairs are not translations. They are recognition bridges. A learner who knows minä but has never met mä can know the pronoun and still lose the sentence.
Use the ranking for coverage, not pronunciation. The list tells you what appears often in one huge screen-dialogue collection. It cannot tell you how a form contracts, overlaps with another speaker, or changes by region.
## A frequency list is a map of its source
OPUS describes OpenSubtitles as subtitles collected from the OpenSubtitles website, aligned and cleaned for language research.[^opensubs-paper] That scale is its strength. Film and television dialogue supplies questions, commands, pronouns and small connective words in enormous quantities.
Its weaknesses are just as concrete. Much of the Finnish material consists of translated subtitles rather than transcripts of original Finnish speech. Subtitle conventions compress speech. Punctuation and casing are noisy. Different releases of the same title can repeat material. Above all, a subtitle is not a phonetic transcript.
For comparison, the Donate Speech project collected about 3,600 hours from more than 20,000 speakers across Finland and asked professional transcribers to preserve repetitions, hesitations, partial words and non-verbal sounds.[^lahjoita] That is much closer to the material a "spoken Finnish" headline promises. Access and licensing make it unsuitable for a casually downloadable public ranking here, and its donor prompts also make it different from two people interrupting each other over coffee.
The older Samples of Spoken Finnish corpus contains 696,376 transcribed words from 50 municipalities, mainly dialect interviews recorded for books published from 1978 to 2000.[^skn] It is genuine speech with extraordinary regional reach. It is also a different generation and interaction type. There is no corpus that simply equals "what Finns say."
## The method, including the boring bits that change the winner
We downloaded the Finnish frequency file linked by the OPUS API for OpenSubtitles v2024. The source reports 570,353,193 Finnish tokens. Processing was:
1. Read every supplied frequency and word-form pair.
2. Convert forms to lowercase and add counts for forms differing only by capitalisation.
3. Keep tokens made of letters, allowing an internal apostrophe or hyphen only when surrounded by letters.
4. Sort by the recomputed count and take the first 200.
5. Tokenise the Finnish field of the 780-entry January 2022 course snapshot in the same lowercase form.
6. Mark an item "in snapshot" only on exact string equality.
We did not lemmatise. We did not correct subtitles. We did not silently replace standard forms with colloquial ones. Counts are left out of the display because corpus size makes them look more universal than they are; the order is the useful part.
The reproducibility anchor is the corpus release, not Finnish IRL. OPUS publishes the monolingual file and describes the wider release; the OpenSubtitles paper documents collection and alignment.[^opus-data][^opensubs-paper]
## What to learn first if your goal is listening
Take ranks 1-50 and circle the families, not the rows. Put on, olen, ole, oli, olet, olla and ovat under olla. Put minä, minua and minun together. Then add the spoken partners.
Listen for the small items before the glamorous nouns. Ei, et and en tell you who is negating. Mitä, miksi, miten and missä tell you what answer the next turn requires. No, niin, ihan, kai and vaan tell you how the speaker is steering the exchange.
Then learn the six absent forms that expose the whole limitation: mä, sä, oon, mun, sun, niinku. None appears in this top 200. All six belong in your ears.
[^opus-data]: [OPUS OpenSubtitles v2024](https://opus.nlpl.eu/OpenSubtitles/corpus/version/OpenSubtitles) - the API lists 139,983 Finnish documents and 570,353,193 source tokens and links the monolingual frequency file used here
[^opensubs-paper]: [OpenSubtitles2018](https://aclanthology.org/L18-1275/) - Pierre Lison and Jörg Tiedemann, LREC 2018, documenting collection, alignment and filtering of the subtitle corpus
[^duo-snapshot]: [Duolingo Finnish (complete)](https://mylittlewordland.com/course/287600/duolingo-finnish-complete) - an unofficial 780-entry snapshot whose description dates its completeness to January 2022
[^storhammar]: [Puhekielen asema ulkomaalaisopetuksessa](https://www.kotikielenseura.fi/virittaja/hakemistot/jutut/1994_97.pdf) - Marja-Terttu Storhammar, Virittäjä 98(1), 1994, especially the audience comparison on pp. 101-104
[^lahjoita]: [Lahjoita puhetta](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09606-3) - Moisio, Porjazovski, Rouhe et al., describing about 3,600 hours, more than 20,000 speakers and the exact-transcription procedure
[^skn]: [Samples of Spoken Finnish](https://www.kielipankki.fi/arkisto/resource-info/spoken-corpora/#skn) - Kielipankki corpus description, including token count, municipalities, dates and normalisation layers
FAQ:
Q: What is the most common Finnish word?
A: In the OPUS OpenSubtitles 2024 Finnish word-form file after merging capitalisation and removing punctuation, it is on, the third-person singular form of olla, 'to be'. A different corpus or a lemma-based count can produce a different ranking.
Q: Are these the most common words in spoken Finnish?
A: They are common alphabetic forms in a large subtitle corpus, not a spontaneous-speech corpus. Translated and edited subtitle Finnish favours forms such as minä strongly enough to change the list.
Q: How many Finnish words does Duolingo teach?
A: The dated third-party snapshot used here contains 780 entries, not necessarily 780 unique lemmas. Duolingo does not publish a stable, versioned master vocabulary for this audit, so that number must not be treated as the current official course total.
Q: Does Duolingo teach spoken Finnish?
A: The snapshot contains useful conversational items such as no, ihan, vaan and kai, but its pronouns and verb forms lean standard: minä, sinä and olen rather than mä, sä and oon. That makes it a start for listening, not a complete model of ordinary conversation.
Q: Why are minä, minua and minun separate entries?
A: This is a word-form list. Finnish cases and verb inflection create separate surface forms, so minä, minua and minun are counted separately even though a learner can study them as one pronoun family.
Q: Should I memorise all 200 in order?
A: No. Start with the high-frequency families and their spoken partners: olla, the personal pronouns, demonstratives, negatives and question words. Recognition in a sentence matters more than knowing that one form ranks 74th.
Q: Why is hän so high if Finns say se?
A: Subtitles regularly prefer standard written pronouns even when translating informal dialogue. In ordinary colloquial Finnish, se commonly refers to a person without being rude, so learn hän and se as a listening pair.
Q: Can I cite this ranking?
A: Yes, if you describe it as Finnish OpenSubtitles 2024 word forms processed with the method stated here. Do not relabel it as a universal list of spoken Finnish lemmas.
Sources:
- OPUS OpenSubtitles v2024 corpus and monolingual Finnish download: https://opus.nlpl.eu/OpenSubtitles/corpus/version/OpenSubtitles
- OpenSubtitles2018: Statistical Rescoring of Sentence Alignments in Large, Noisy Parallel Corpora: https://aclanthology.org/L18-1275/
- Lahjoita puhetta: a large-scale corpus of spoken Finnish with some benchmarks: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09606-3
- Samples of Spoken Finnish corpus description: https://www.kielipankki.fi/arkisto/resource-info/spoken-corpora/#skn
- Duolingo Finnish (complete), unofficial January 2022 vocabulary snapshot: https://mylittlewordland.com/course/287600/duolingo-finnish-complete
- List of Finnish vocabulary, lesson by lesson: https://duolingo.hobune.stream/comment/39861072
- Puhekielen asema ulkomaalaisopetuksessa, Virittäjä 98(1), 97-109: https://www.kotikielenseura.fi/virittaja/hakemistot/jutut/1994_97.pdf
Related words: ma, sa, oon, niinku