Finnish grammar 2: past tense

second episode of my finnish grammar series is finally here. I Hope you find it useful and fun.

The song "Once Upon A Long Ago" is one of Paul McCartney's.

The title picture is from Auho lake, Puolanka (in the region of Kainuu in upper eastern Finland). You can find the same picture in GoogleEarth/panorama.com

Category:

Education

Tags:

• learn
• Finnish
• grammar
• verbs
• past
• tense
• imperfect
• once
• upon
• long
• ago
• Paul
• McCartney

[nemosangel]

So there is no rule for where the "i" has to go, right? You just have to memorize it??

[ProLimukka]

Yes and no. The "i" always comes between the root and the endings indicating person and number. The endings are the same, but the root cannot directly be picked from infinitive. All verbs follow a regular pattern, but there are more than 70 different variations of the basic pattern, so in practice you have to memorize infinitive and e.g. first person singular present and past tense. From these forms you can 99 %:ly find out all other forms.

[ProLimukka]

'sinä' = you (one person)

'te' = you (two or more persons)

But 'te' can also refer to one person in formal speech. I have explained this in detail in another comment earlier.

[Myeenh]

That makes sense... Finnish and Hungarian are related languages :D

[czRanito]

I learn finnish...I have finnish textbooks, watch movies, listen to music...Videos on YouTube are pretty rare, and thanks a lot for them !!!

P.S. those pictures are pretty funny :-)

[kavisicaria]

@joulupukki3smurffi no one needs it^^

and there's no future tense in English, neither: you use "go" or "will", those are verbs of there own that became auxiliaries

[aliothalive]

classes are great but the music is pretty weird ^^

[joulupukki3smurffi]

why is it that there is no future tense in finnish?

[elenafriend23]

Thank you for this movie, a very useful one, especially for beginners!!

[Ashfordly]

This has really helped me with my finnish language.

[Khon444Thai]

i notice now, finnish grammar is so much similar to russian (almost the same). too easy to learn for me - i need to learn just the words. How to read the letters: exacty 100% (maybe 99) like in German language. I know German.

[lsg5200]

When I was learning English grammar, I found it so easy and I could hardly make a mistake. However, Finnish grammar is all about memorizing and remembering the tenses, very tough language indeed.