Pöydän reunalla
You are at the table and slightly beside the conversation, which is exactly the position this site exists for. Nothing you got wrong was a vocabulary problem - it was that the words had changed shape.
Start with the spoken forms of what you already know. Minä becomes mä, olen becomes oon, menemme becomes mennään, en tiedä becomes en tiiä. The changes are regular, so learning one covers fifty.
From Could You Follow a Finnish Coffee Break? - 6 lines of real spoken Finnish on Finnish IRL.
One word.
Every morning.
One real Finnish word every morning - what it means, what the book form is, and when Finns actually say it.