The Finnish language
My material on Finnish
For those foreigners who would like know about
the Finnish language
(ISO 639 code: fi
, Finnish name: suomi)
I have a few things to offer:
The e-books
Introduction to Finnish and
Handbook of Finnish.
Some web pages:
- A short introduction to Finnish.
-
Pronunciation information.
- Pronunciation of Finnish in a nutshell (for linguists).
- Some examples
of Finnish words and phrases.
- Information about the cases in Finnish.
- Modes of verbs in Finnish
-
Consonant gradation in Finnish – the true story
- "False friends" in English and Finnish.
- Letters in Finnish.
The use of alphabetic characters in Finnish texts.
- Consonant
assimilation at word boundaries in Finnish; the (in)famous
gemination phenomenon
- Finnish language and localization: an executive summary
Material related to Finnish elsewhere
- Finnish characterized - a short overview by
Eugene Holman.
- The
Finnish Language at
Virtual
Finland.
- Tavataan taas,
a rather extensive course on
Finnish, with English as the teaching language
(language centre of the University of Helsinki)
- A few common words and phrases, with sound (WAV format) samples.
-
Sound (WAV format) samples for a large number
of names.
- The most
common 1000 words in Finnish (based on newspaper material;
explanations in Finnish)
- Information about books about Finnish:
-
Books
useful for learning Finnish
(a list with different people's short evaluations); this is in
the section
for Finland in the Nordic FAQ (soc.culture.nordic FAQ).
- Books About Finnish as a Foreign Language.
- Introduction to Finnish
by Päivi Rentz.
Contains quite a lot of information, including
a nice concise presentation of the pronunciation of Finnish
with sound samples (in
.au
format).
- Finnish for Travelers
by travlang. The information
about Finnish
is also available in other languages than English, through a
form.
- Finnplace's online dictionary
(English-Finnish-English; previously known as Mofile's).
- Eurodicautom - multilingual
online dictionary. It is basically a database of technical terms
from various fields. You can use it via the following simplified
search form:
- Section
Finnish in
A
yourDictionary.com Dictionaries.
- Lingsoft material, e.g.
FINTWOL,
a morphological
analyzer.
- Kielikone
used to have a free demo of their
TranSmart
translation software
(from Finnish to English), but now they only have a paid service
without a demo.
- Ymmärrä
suomea - for testing how you understand Finnish and for
brushing up your Finnish. Contains relatively simple but
real-life sample texts in Finnish.
- Verbix
is a service for conjugating verbs in several languages; you can
use it to conjugate Finnish verbs, too.
Courses on Finnish in Finland
At the University of Helsinki
the
Language centre services
include courses of different levels (starting from beginners)
on Finnish. The courses are open to everyone (for a fee).
You might also find something suitable in
the
adult education system, such as
courses
in Finnish at the
Helsinki Adult Education Center (työväenopisto).
See also Discover
Finland,
a Web site with confusing structure but
with information about
studying
Finnish in Finland and abroad.
Discussion forum
There is discussion group for Finnish at Yahoo Groups.
It has Finnish and English as the main languages.
On Usenet,
the group
sfnet.keskustelu.kieli
discusses language issues, mostly in Finnish about Finnish.
The group is reasonably active, and it has a small
FAQ in Finnish.
If the group does not belong to the set of groups accessible using
your
news server, you can
access the group
via
Google Groups.
Other information
The iLoveLanguages
site,
formerly known as Human Languages Page,
contains
a collection of links related to Finnish
language and literature.
See also:
I have moved the information about Finnish in Finnish
to a separate page,
Aineistoa suomen kielestä.