Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Teach Yourself Finnish


A couple weeks ago i received my Teach Yourself Finnish book and CD's along with my Finnish-English pocket dictionary from Amazon. I don't have any delusion in my mind that it's going to take me forever to learn this language, but i still can't help but be optimistic.

I've been practicing along with the CD's in my car, and i think i'm getting pretty good. My favorite phrase i've learned so far is "silloin tällöin" which means "now and then". It's my favorite because it sounds really cool. I also like "hyvää päivää" a lot also. That means "good day".

The thing that's taking the most getting used to is the vowels. They're 8, and there's short and long forms. The trickiest is "y" because it's doesn't sound anything close what it sounds like in English, so i'm not going to even try to type it out phonetically. I think i've got it down now though.

Speaking of which, i think i'm going to practice now...

4 comments:

Cameron Lawrence said...

Right on, keep with it, dude. Hope it's still going well.

Cameron Lawrence said...

And now I realize you just posted this yesterday. Well, I still hope it's going well.

Anonymous said...

The Finnish "Y" is extremely phonetic compared to silly English. ;)

(Says someone about to go major in English Philology!)

Jason Lepojärvi said...

Ben,

Awesome. I salute you for your courage. I support you one hundred percent.

See you when you get here.

Jason
(Helsinki)