Basics

The basics will teach you some basic words, including the verbs to be and not.

The verbs
To be is probably the most important verb in any language. In Finnish every person has a different ending:

This table will show you the conjugation of the verb to be and also the personal pronouns of Finnish language. Notice how Finnish does not separate between he and she, but there are two different words you for single person and more than one person - like old English used to have.

In the table you see some verb endings in bold. These verb endings you can use with all Finnish words in all different tenses (present and past). Isn't that useful!

Finnish also has a special verb, the negative. This you combine with other verbs to say that someone is not or does not do something. The negative verb is a kind of an auxiliary verb and with it the other verb stays constant through different persons. Let's see how to conjugate the negative.

Notice how the verb endings are the same for these two verbs, except for the singular third person (he/she) which is a bit irregular – but luckily not for other verbs as we will see later.

One kind of plural
To say that some people are a group of something, you will need the plural. In the basics we will not explain the plural partitive case but we'll just mention that that is what we are using. Here is a list of the nouns used in the basics lessons. There is a lot to learn about the partitive and the plural but at this point we just want to draw your attention to how every plural partitive above ends in -ia/-iä, or as -ja/-jä when -i- is squeezed between two vowels.

Erm then... what's with the a/ä thing, you might wonder. In the verbs we had ovat and eivät and here we have -ia/-iä. It has to do with vowel harmony. Harmony in general and vowel harmony in particular are beautiful things and you can read more about on the Finnish vowel harmony wikipedia. It is recommended not to think ä or ö as a or o with accent. Sure, the first look like the latter with something added, but m looks like n with something added and t looks like l with something added yet we still recognize them as separate letters. Do a favour to yourself and all the lovers of the Finnish languge and forget about accents - Finnish does not have accents.

A/the, and grammatical gender
Finnish language does not use articles. Poika is as much 'a boy' as it is 'the boy'. Depending on the context one or both of the translations are possible.

Another thing that Finnish does not have is grammatical gender. If you have studied Indo-European languages you may be relieved that you do not have to learn weather a noun is masculine, feminine, common gender or neuter. See, Finnish grammar is not that bad!

Questions
All questions which can have a yes or no as answer are made the same way. First you inverse the word order so that the verb become before subject and then you add -ko/-kö to the end of the verb. In negative questions, the suffix -ko/-kö is added to the negative verb. You can see that English does the same thing with auxiliary verbs but Finnish uses this word order in every yes or no question. Additional verbs, equivalent to the English do, are not used.