As an English speaker learning German, I face endless confusion and frustration with many of the short question words that are “False Friends”
Such as:
Wer (where) - Actually means who.
Wo (Who) - Actually means where.
Wie (We) - Actually means how.
Was (was) - Actually means what.
Also (also) - Actually means so.
Will (will) - Actually means to want.
And the completely arbitrary gender assignments!
For example.
The year is: Das Jahr, a neuter word.
The month is: Der Monat, a masculine word.
And the week is: Die Woche, a feminine word.
And then there’s directly counter-intuitive examples of words that seem like they Should be a gender other than what they are, such as:
The little girl - Das Mädchen (Neuter, not feminine)
Breasts - Der Busen (Masculine! Boobs is masculine!)
Person - Die Person (Feminine! Why isn’t this word neuter?!"
Any recommendations for learning resources especially for grammar? I’m currently in s low motivation phase for learning Finnish, but I should get started again.
I’m currently using duolingo which is usually good enough but kinda sucks in this case. There was an app mentioned here that had Finnish as one of its first languages and could be good but sadly I didn’t save it. If anyone remembers it please do say.
Yeah, I’ve been done with the Duolingo course for a while now.
As for the other app, you might be talking about Lingonaut. They’ll have Finnish from the start. The iOS version is in beta and they just started development of the Android version.
Or you are talking about Anki, I’ve made a super deck with all the Finnish courses and removed the duplicates, but I lack the motivation to get started again.
Yeah Lingonaut might be it, it was something new. If you are on a good level you could try some content outside of lessons. There is !suomiblogit@sopuli.xyz here where I can’t understand anything yet but maybe you’ll have more luck.
Duolingo had extremely good grammar lectures for many languages, hidden under a “hints” button underneath each learning node. And then Duolingo went and deleted all of that information, making the “hints” button essentially useless and nullifying hundreds of hours of work volunteers had put into writing the grammar lectures there! Finnish is one of the languages where the volunteer crew had made a seriously big effort writing good quality grammar lectures in the “hints” sections. And then one day: *poof*!
A solution I have found useful with various languages has been figuring out what are the reasons some stuff is done in a very unusual manner. There’s basically always something such a rule allows you to take shortcuts at in some whole other language situation. When you notice that the very weird structure is not used in some situation, you get much more precision in understanding what that means. All languages have things that are ambiguous because the grammar leaves things unsaid. “We are ugly” doesn’t really tell whether you, trolske, are ugly or if it’s only me and a couple other people who are. But there languages where you have a different word for “we” depending on whether it also includes the people being talked to, or not. (Finnish is not one of those languages, though :( )
That’s a rule that is a bit annoying to learn because instead of “I, you, she, we, youse, they” you need to learn “I, you she, we, wo, youse, they”. One extra word. But damn it’s satisfying when you hear “we are ugly” said in that language and know precisely that you are not included! Or “Wo are ugly”, meaning that yes, “wo are indeed ugly, including you.”
When you find out why the complexity exists, your brain stops rebelling against the rule and you will learn what needs to be learned!