The green owl gets you through introductions, pets, food, places, chores and the present tense. Then the path ends. At the next Finnish coffee break, the first sentence can still sound as if somebody put your course through a paper shredder.
That is not because the course taught fake Finnish. It taught the real language in the register people write and read aloud. Ordinary conversation uses another set of shapes: minä olen becomes mä oon, sinä olet becomes sä oot, and me menemme becomes me mennään.1
Here is what survives each part of the course, what changes in the room, and where the owl leaves you to walk.
First, which course did we audit?
The dated public snapshot from May 2024 records 35 units, 563 lessons, about 1,100 words and no Stories.2 The archive page was last edited in March 2025. Its two sections run from introductions and common phrases through people, pets, places, food, questions, languages and chores. Duolingo can change the number shown on your phone by repackaging paths, so this article audits that dated content, not the cosmetics around it.
Kielibuusti, a Finnish-language learning project run by Aalto University and the University of Helsinki, gives the fairest short verdict we found: game-based, attractive and useful in small pieces; limited in Finnish, partly unnatural in voice, unable to practise speaking or pronunciation, and using standard Finnish for communicative phrases.3
That last line is the hinge. Duolingo says its units organise vocabulary and grammar around communication goals.4 The Finnish course does that. But the communication is dressed for the page.
Units 1-6: excellent bones, formal clothes
Introductions and common phrases are exactly where a beginner should start. The vocabulary transfers. The pronouns and verbs need relabelling before your ear will find them.
| Course shape | What reaches you | English |
|---|---|---|
| Course shapeMinä olen… | What reaches youMä oon… | EnglishI am… |
| Course shapeSinä olet… | What reaches youSä oot… | EnglishYou are… |
| Course shapeHän on… | What reaches youSe on… | EnglishHe/she is… |
| Course shapeMistä sinä olet? | What reaches youMistä sä oot? | EnglishWhere are you from? |
The surprise is not any one replacement. It is that the short, frequent words change first. Those are the words a learner uses to locate the rest of the sentence.
Do not throw away minä olen. Attach mä oon to it. One is the form you will read; the other is the form you need to recognise before the noun arrives.
Units 7-13: the grammar transfers better than the sound
Present tense, possessions, questions, food and amounts build genuinely useful machinery. Finnish endings carry information English gives to separate words, and repeated sentence exercises help that architecture stop looking alien.
The listening problem begins when the most informative-looking pieces shrink.
| What you know | What you may hear | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| What you knowOnko sinulla aikaa? | What you may hearOnks sul aikaa? | What happened-ko compresses to -ks; pronoun shortens |
| What you knowMinulla on | What you may hearMul on | What happenedpossession remains; the surface loses syllables |
| What you knowEn tiedä | What you may hearEn tiiä | What happenedlong vowel replaces written d |
| What you knowEi ole | What you may hearEi oo | What happenedcommon verb contracts |
This is why completing another standard sentence can improve your Finnish while doing almost nothing for the sentence that just went past. You possess the underlying rule. Your ear has not yet indexed its street clothes.
Units 14-20: useful content, missing conversation glue
Languages, chores and ability give you verbs for things adults actually discuss. What is thin is not vocabulary but turn-taking: the particles and repairs that tell you what the speaker is doing.
Listen for these alongside the unit material:
- no: opens, redirects, concedes or buys time
- nii: yes, exactly, so, or a sign the other person is following
- eiku: cancel what came immediately before; a correction follows
- kato: look, you see, or here is why
- niinku: like; also a half-second in which the sentence gets built
A sentence app rewards the words that carry dictionary meaning. A real exchange leans heavily on words that manage the relationship between sentences. Missing eiku is especially expensive: you can understand every noun and confidently leave with the answer the speaker just cancelled.
Units 21-35: the course ends where speech should begin
The later path adds breadth but does not change register. By now you can decode controlled sentences. The next useful test is whether you recognise the same thought after ordinary speech has changed the pronoun, shortened the verb and replaced the first-person plural.
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1CourseMe menemme tänään kauppaan.
We are going to the shop today. -
2Common speechMe mennään tänään kauppaan.
The passive-looking form does the work of "we go". -
3Faster speechMennään tänään kauppaan.
The pronoun can disappear because the shared plan is obvious.
The third line is not advanced vocabulary. It is beginner vocabulary after the room has handled it.
All 35 units, audited
This is the complete May 2024 path rather than a sample. “Keep” means the communication goal transfers directly. “Patch” names the listening layer to attach; it does not claim every example in that unit contains the form shown.2
| Unit | Duolingo goal | Listening patch |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduce yourself | minä olen -> mä oon |
| 2 | Use common phrases | keep; add no, nii and eiku |
| 3 | Talk about people | hän/he -> se/ne in ordinary speech |
| 4 | Describe things | keep the adjectives; expect shortened endings |
| 5 | Discuss your pets | keep; person-reference se is not insulting |
| 6 | Talk about places | missä -> mis in fast speech |
| 7 | Use the present tense | olen/olet -> oon/oot |
| 8 | Talk about possessions | minulla/sinulla -> mulla/sulla |
| 9 | Ask and answer questions | -ko/-kö -> -ks |
| 10 | Refer to languages | keep; language names survive intact |
| 11 | Talk about food | keep nouns; listen for partitive endings |
| 12 | Find out where places are | onko -> onks |
| 13 | Describe amounts | keep; spoken numbers need their own pass |
| 14 | Discuss languages | add the repair mitä toi tarkottaa? |
| 15 | Talk about chores | common verbs may lose d: tiedä -> tiiä |
| 16 | Say what you can do | voinko -> voinks |
| 17 | Make requests | hear the verb before waiting for a pronoun |
| 18 | Form the plural | he tulevat -> ne tulee |
| 19 | Discuss where people live | asun stays; surrounding pronouns shrink |
| 20 | Use numbers | expect compressed compounds in prices and times |
| 21 | Form negative sentences | ei ole -> ei oo |
| 22 | Talk about nature | keep; regional speakers become the harder variable |
| 23 | Express fondness | minä pidän may yield to mä tykkään |
| 24 | Go to a coffee shop | otatko -> otaks |
| 25 | Tell time | train the spoken number as one sound chunk |
| 26 | Form sentences | add correction markers such as eiku |
| 27 | Use common phrases | add tone; joo is not one fixed answer |
| 28 | Talk about technology | keep nouns; English loans may take Finnish case endings |
| 29 | Order food and drink | minä otan -> mä otan or otan |
| 30 | Explore a city | announcements stay more standard than passengers |
| 31 | Shop for clothes | onko tätä -> onks tätä |
| 32 | Use words ending in i | keep; the inflection is still load-bearing |
| 33 | Discuss your vacation | menimme -> me mentiin |
| 34 | Talk about hobbies | minä käyn -> mä käyn |
| 35 | Say goodbye | keep moi; add moikka and regional moro |
The twelve-form rescue kit
If you finished the path, do not restart Finnish. Add these correspondences to what you already know.
| Book form | Spoken form | Catch it in |
|---|---|---|
| Book formminä | Spoken formmä | Catch it inmä meen |
| Book formsinä | Spoken formsä | Catch it insä tuut |
| Book formhän | Spoken formse | Catch it inse sanoo |
| Book formhe | Spoken formne | Catch it inne tulee |
| Book formolen | Spoken formoon | Catch it inmä oon |
| Book formolet | Spoken formoot | Catch it insä oot |
| Book formei ole | Spoken formei oo | Catch it inei oo vielä |
| Book formmenemme | Spoken formmennään | Catch it inme mennään |
| Book formtiedä | Spoken formtiiä | Catch it inen tiiä |
| Book form-ko/-kö | Spoken form-ks | Catch it inonks |
| Book formminulla | Spoken formmulla | Catch it inmulla on |
| Book formsinulla | Spoken formsulla | Catch it insulla on |
These are common colloquial forms and are broadly understood, but their exact shape and frequency vary by region and speaker. The national Donate Speech corpus contains thousands of hours from more than 20,000 speakers across Finland precisely because ordinary Finnish varies by region, age and situation.5
The honest scorecard
| Job | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Starting from zero | Good |
| Building a daily habit | Very good if the game works on you |
| Basic spelling and sentence structure | Good |
| Pronunciation feedback | Missing |
| Multi-turn conversation | Thin |
| Recognising puhekieli | Needs a separate layer |
| Getting beyond A1 | The path runs out |
Duolingo Finnish is not a scam, and finishing it is not fluency. Both of those internet verdicts are too satisfying to be useful. It is a compact beginning whose strongest knowledge is hidden under unfamiliar spoken forms.
Keep the owl. Add ears.
Footnotes
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Colloquial Finnish, Iso suomen kielioppi. ↩
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Finnish from English: 35-unit course snapshot, archived July 2025. ↩
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Duolingo: independent Finnish self-study review, Kielibuusti. ↩
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How Duolingo organises courses around communication goals, Duolingo. ↩
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Donate Speech: a large-scale corpus of colloquial Finnish, Language Resources and Evaluation. ↩
