TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Iván » 2018-03-07, 10:09

¡Hola!

He estado cotilleando un poco tu TAC y ya he visto que te han ido dejando algunos recursos para poder aprender finés. Te entiendo completamente cuando dices "no sé qué estoy estudiando" o simplemente la sensación de no saber muy bien si estás avanzando o qué estás haciendo. Yo siempre digo que el finés no es un idioma difícil, sino que es diferente (incluso demasiado).

De todas formas, mi recomendación es que no lo dejes. Sí, te costará horrores aprenderte la gramática, pero una vez lo hagas, verás que es un idioma muy regular, es decir, te encontrarás con muy pocas excepciones; y los finlandeses, a diferencia de muchos otros nativos de los países nórdicos, suelen estar dispuestos a echarte una mano si saben que estás aprendiendo su idioma.

Yo la gramática no me la sé de cabo a rabo y es uno de mis errores, ya que es un idioma que empecé a aprender hace mucho tiempo y al principio fue todo de oídas, por eso muchas veces cuando aprendo un nuevo verbo o una nueva palabra no sé muy bien cómo declinarla...
Minkä nuorena oppii, sen vanhana taitaa.

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby linguoboy » 2018-03-07, 17:42

dEhiN wrote:You're right, I do have a tendency to overcorrect. I've hopefully gotten better over the years, but it's the teacher/tutor in me: I either let it all slide, including real mistakes, because I don't tap into the teacher side of me, or I tap in and then start correcting every little thing!

It's a difficult balance, and one of the things which made proofreading a real challenge for me.
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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Antea » 2018-03-07, 18:53

Iván wrote:De todas formas, mi recomendación es que no lo dejes. Sí, te costará horrores aprenderte la gramática, pero una vez lo hagas, verás que es un idioma muy regular, es decir, te encontrarás con muy pocas excepciones; y los finlandeses, a diferencia de muchos otros nativos de los países nórdicos, suelen estar dispuestos a echarte una mano si saben que estás aprendiendo su idioma.


Hola, y gracias por tus consejos. Si, lo cierto es que es un idioma bastante diferente a los que he estudiado hasta ahora, pero precisamente por eso tengo ganas de continuar. Intento tomármelo con paciencia, sobretodo por el tema del vocabulario que no se parece a ninguna de las otras familias lingüísticas que conozco, y eso ya de por sí, es bastante duro (aparte de la gramática, claro está, que también es complicada :roll: ).

Para mí, es empezar absolutamente de cero, ya que en otros idiomas siempre cuento desde el principio con algún vocabulario base, o palabras similares, y en este caso, no.
También me interesan bastante algunos dialectos. Pero bueno, intento ir paso a paso y acostumbrarme al idioma :yep:

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby dEhiN » 2018-03-07, 22:07

Iván wrote:Yo la gramática no me la sé de cabo a rabo y es uno de mis errores, ya que es un idioma que empecé a aprender hace mucho tiempo y al principio fue todo de oídas, por eso muchas veces cuando aprendo un nuevo verbo o una nueva palabra no sé muy bien cómo declinarla...

I've experienced similar with respect to French, Spanish, and Portuguese. I started learning each of them through interacting with others. Because of this, there were (and still are) things about the grammar of each of those 3 languages that I haven't learned properly. I keep meaning to sit down and go through a grammar resources for each language, but I struggle with the motivation to do so.
Native: (en-ca)
Active: (fr)(es)(pt-br)(ta-lk)(mi)(sq)(tl)
Inactive: (de)(ja)(yue)(oj)(id)(hu)(pl)(tr)(hi)(zh)(sv)(ko)(no)(it)(haw)(fy)(nl)(nah)(gl)(ro)(cy)(oc)(an)(sr)(en_old)(got)(sux)(grc)(la)(sgn-us)

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Vlürch » 2018-03-09, 17:54

I don't know if I'm allowed to post here since I don't do TACs or anything myself, but I randomly stumbled upon this thread and feel like as a Finn there are a few questions I might be able to answer and whatnot.
Antea wrote:I have the feeling that I will understand something better in these two (maybe they use more similar words to Russian?

Yeah, that's almost certainly why. Finnish has only a few recent loanwords from Russian in the standard language while Karelian and Estonian at least have tons of them, as well as having more calques from Russian AFAIK; the Russian influence on Finnish is mostly limited to pre-Soviet times, but the speakers of Karelian, Estonian and most other Finnic languages live in areas that became part of the Soviet Union and as such were highly influenced by Russian as it was infintely more prestigious. In Finland, there was a lot of Soviet influence politically and whatnot, but little Russian influence on the language except old Helsinki slang and maybe some eastern dialects.
Antea wrote:But it’s a mess, because some words are different and I can’t find them in a Finnish dictionary. And I don’t know exactly if these varieties are mutually intelligible with Finnish or not

As a general rule, none of the other Finnic languages are mutually intelligible with Finnish because it has so many Swedish loanwords and they have so many Russian loanwords. It's practically impossible to have even a short conversation in Finnish without at least one Swedish loanword. There may be some Swedish and/or other Scandinavian loanwords in other Finnic languages, but nowhere near as many as in Finnish.

As for dictionaries, here's a Finnish-Karelian one that's a little clunky to use; you have to type a Finnish word in the search bar where it reads hakusana (literally "search word") and then click on it to see the Karelian translations, or in selite/suomennos ("explanation/Finnish translation") and click on the Karelian words to see a Finnish translation.
Antea wrote:And could it really be possible that there are actually more audio materials in the internet in Karelian than in Finnish?

I highly doubt that, considering Karelian is only spoken by about 36,000 people and Finnish is spoken by about 5 million.
Antea wrote:Well, maybe it’s just that I don’t know where to look :roll: . So any suggestions will be welcomed :yep:

First some resources for vocabulary, which you may already know but I'm posting anyway in case you don't:

Wiktionary is a good resource, of course, and so is sanakirja.org. The latter is arguably the best translation site imho since it has words in a bunch of different languages and so far I've yet to find any serious mistakes, although it does tend to give many translations that are often not synonyms, so you should look them up on other dictionaries as well if you're unsure. It also has links to articles from Helsingin Sanomat on the front page, so you can easily get stuff to read in Finnish.

Glosbe is also really good as an English-Finnish/Finnish-English dictionary. It does have the same problem as sanakirja.org, but that's pretty much to be expected when translating between two languages that are so different. I can't really say much about its quality when translating from Russian to Finnish since my knowledge of Russian is really limited, but based on the few words I looked up it seems surprisingly accurate.

Then some good audio resources:

Youtube, like you already know. Honestly, I'd say that's all you need if you want to learn Finnish that's neither too formal nor too informal. It's admittedly not good for kirjakieli since no one actually speaks that, but for puhekieli or something that often falls somewhere in between the two extremes but on the more informal side, there's a near-endless supply of material. Vlogging is a pretty big thing here, so there are literally thousands of people who just make videos where they talk to the camera about their lives. A few of the hugely popular Finnish youtubers are deata, mmiisas, Lakko and mansikkka. There are usually a lot of random Finnish youtubers in all the recommendations if you watch videos by any one of them, so you can easily find a lot of new ones.
Antea wrote:I have been looking in the net, but I find contradictory answers :hmm:

Well, it's kind of complicated; there are tons of different dialects of Karelian, all of which are Finnishised to varying degrees and are usually more understandable in writing than speech AFAICT. Then again, there isn't even a clear distinction between the dialects of the Karelian language and the Karelian dialects of Finnish, so something "Karelian" can be entirely comprehensible or entirely incomprehensible. To further complicate things, there's the fact that Karelian as a single language is rejected by a lot of people. So, the reason you find contradictory answers is that it depends on way too many things to be measured objectively; one thing that probably plays a huge part is exposure.
vijayjohn wrote:Karelian may be a somewhat more complicated case since the Southeastern dialects of Finland are also called 'Karelian dialects' in Finnish, but these are different from the Karelian language spoken in Karelia.

This, and also adding to how complicated it is is that some Karelians consider the Karelian dialects of Finnish to be a separate Karelian language. AFAIK that's a small minority, but considering how people from other parts of Finland can't really understand them without at least some exposure... I mean, it's really a total mess.

When someone says "Karelian", they could mean any of the following:
1. Dialects of the Karelian language spoken in Russia
2. Dialects of the Karelian language spoken in Finland (nearly extinct)
3. Karelian dialects of the Finnish language spoken in Russia
4. Karelian dialects of the Finnish language spoken in Finland
5. Standard Finnish with a Karelian accent
Antea wrote:continue to listen to Karelian audio materials.

Can you link some? I don't know any and would be interested, if for no other purpose than to feel some kind of transgenerational nostalgia over my mum's side of the family being mostly from Karelia. :P
linguoboy wrote:There are some surprising cognates between Finnish and other Germanic languages.

I know your train of thought just had some kind of bump with that sentence, but someone who doesn't know anything about Finnish might read that sentence and take it as meaning Finnish is a Germanic language, so I figured I'd point that out to anyone who might think so (or in case you hadn't noticed).

But yeah, there are a lot of loanwords from Germanic languages in Finnish. The grammar has also been heavily influenced by them, especially Swedish and recently English. There are a lot of Baltic loanwords, too, but they're typically older and may be even harder to pick up as loanwords.

EDIT: Epic brain fart. My mum's side is from Karelia, not my dad's... I was on the phone with my dad when I typed that, so... :P
Last edited by Vlürch on 2018-03-09, 18:26, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby linguoboy » 2018-03-09, 18:00

Vlürch wrote:
linguoboy wrote:There are some surprising cognates between Finnish and other Germanic languages.

I know your train of thought just had some kind of bump with that sentence, but someone who doesn't know anything about Finnish might read that sentence and take it as meaning Finnish is a Germanic language, so I figured I'd point that out to anyone who might think so (or in case you hadn't noticed).

But yeah, there are a lot of loanwords from Germanic languages in Finnish. The grammar has also been heavily influenced by them, especially Swedish and recently English. There are a lot of Baltic loanwords, too, but they're typically older and may be even harder to pick up as loanwords.

"other Germanic languages" = "Germanic languages other than English".

FWIW, you could also have "corrected" that sentence simply by supplying a comma between "other" and "Germanic", which would have come closer to preserving the original meaning.
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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Naava » 2018-03-09, 18:19

Vlürch wrote:There may be some Swedish and/or other Scandinavian loanwords in other Finnic languages, but nowhere near as many as in Finnish.

Did you forget meänkieli?

Vlürch wrote:Can you link some? I don't know any and would be interested, if for no other purpose than to feel some kind of transgenerational nostalgia over my dad's side of the family being mostly from Karelia.

There's this one at least.

Do you know which town/city/area they were from? Did they speak one of the Karelian languages or the dialect?

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Antea » 2018-03-09, 18:28

Vlürch wrote:I don't know if I'm allowed to post here since I don't do TACs or anything myself, but I randomly stumbled upon this thread and feel like as a Finn there are a few questions I might be able to answer and whatnot.


Of course, you are very welcome, and I thank you for all the links and resources you have posted :D . They will be very useful for me.

Vlürch wrote:Can you link some? I don't know any and would be interested, if for no other purpose than to feel some kind of transgenerational nostalgia over my dad's side of the family being mostly from Karelia.


I listen to the link posted also by Naava

Naava wrote:There's this one at least.
[/quote]

In this link there are a lot of news of Karelian region, and also some programs about culture and traditions of the region, and some of the programs (not the news, though), have Russian subtitles which is also very useful for me.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPRlYyFmxmA8mq5dXjS0Srg
Last edited by Antea on 2018-03-09, 18:32, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Vlürch » 2018-03-09, 18:32

linguoboy wrote:"other Germanic languages" = "Germanic languages other than English".

But English loanwords in Finnish weren't even mentioned...? Am I missing some obvious implication, like the conversation being in English and thus it being the default language of reference or something? :?
linguoboy wrote:FWIW, you could also have "corrected" that sentence simply by supplying a comma between "other" and "Germanic", which would have come closer to preserving the original meaning.

Ohh... it's kinda ironic I didn't even think about reading it like that since I have a tendency to overuse commas myself. It took real effort to write that without a comma before "since".
Naava wrote:Did you forget meänkieli?

Nah, I just left it out because... well, I don't know, I thought I had a good reason but now I don't remember what it was. :para:
Naava wrote:There's this one at least.

Thanks!
Naava wrote:Do you know which town/city/area they were from? Did they speak one of the Karelian languages or the dialect?

I don't remember, but I could ask my mum.

Also, I had a massive brain fart; my mum's side is from Karelia, not my dad's. I was on the phone with my dad typing that, so it at least kind of makes sense, but lol. :lol: My dad's side is mostly from Savo...
Antea wrote:I thank you for all the links and resources you have posted :D . They will be very useful for me.

No problem! :D

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby linguoboy » 2018-03-09, 18:38

Vlürch wrote:
linguoboy wrote:"other Germanic languages" = "Germanic languages other than English".

But English loanwords in Finnish weren't even mentioned...? Am I missing some obvious implication, like the conversation being in English and thus it being the default language of reference or something?

I think I can trust Antea to recognise recent English loanwords in Finnish when she sees them. It's the Germanic loans which have been around for centuries if not a couple millennia or more that are non-obvious.
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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Naava » 2018-03-09, 18:39

Vlürch wrote:
Naava wrote:There's this one at least.

Thanks!

Np!

Also, I had a massive brain fart; my mum's side is from Karelia, not my dad's. I was on the phone with my dad typing that, so it at least kind of makes sense, but lol. :lol: My dad's side is mostly from Savo...

:lol: Well, in that case we have something in common. My mum's mum is from Räisälä.

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Antea » 2018-03-21, 11:09

(ru) I recently had a lesson of Russian, just in order to check my present level. At the moment, because of my interest in Finno-Ugric languages, I read a lot of Russian internet sites, and I listen also to some Russian programs about culture, traditions, etc. But, of course, I don't speak. And my lesson of today was indeed very hard, because every time I try to express some basic thought, I get entangled in grammar case declensions, and that's preventing me to speak normally. I can listen and read, and I understand, but speaking.....So yes, one can easily be depressed about that :roll:

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-05-27, 15:47

Late, but I have problems with Russian grammar all the time when trying to write something, too, so that's understandable, and you're certainly not alone! It can also be a little frustrating when native speakers try to help me out by pointing out my mistakes, especially when they almost sound like they're arguing with each other. :P I haven't had any opportunities to speak it in years from what I remember. I guess I just appreciate it when people point out what I wrote wrong. :)

If it helps, one thing I try to do at least on UniLang (in a bunch of languages, not just Russian) is to make a list of mistakes I've made and then try to find a context where I can produce sentences using the right forms. Things like TPAM are a good opportunity for that in a lot of cases because you can say all kinds of things about the next person at the end of the post.

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Antea » 2018-06-03, 11:54

Hey, time for an update.

(ar) So, as always, very busy with Arabic, vocabulary, reading, etc. I have started to read Arabic articles on internet on a regular basis. Also, a lot of listening of travel bloggers, programs, etc.

(ru) Maintaining Russian, but not studying it actively.

(sv) Learning everyday more and very satisfied with my progress. Actually I have already done more than half Assimil lessons. Also trying to get used to pronunciation that is giving me a hard time.

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-06-03, 15:06

That sounds like pretty good progress to me. Good job! :)

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Antea » 2018-06-30, 15:06

Well, the situation at moment is quite chaotic. Mainly because I have started to learn two new languages (unexpectedly), Irish and Hebrew, and I am trying very hard no to fall also for Icelandic (now that it’s no more “an obscure” language).

As for Swedish, I am finishing Assimil, but there’s still a long way to go, because both my oral and reading level are like A2 for now, so I should try to listen to more podcasts or something.

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby kevin » 2018-06-30, 15:19

Should we start an Icelandic study group? :lol:

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby Antea » 2018-06-30, 17:10

I have all my material ready :wink: :whistle:

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby kevin » 2018-06-30, 18:33

It's been a while since I went through Learning Icelandic, so I've probably forgotten most of it again. But it's still on my shelf. ;)

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Re: TAC 2018 - Antea (Finnish, Swedish)

Postby księżycowy » 2018-06-30, 20:42

If only I wasn't learning German at the moment! I would so join an Icelandic group!


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