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Lesson Transcript

Hei, minun nimeni on Paula. Hi everybody! I’m Paula.
Welcome to FinnishPod101.com’s “Suomea kolmessa minuutissa”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Finnish.
In the last lesson, we learned how to talk about your plans. In this lesson, we are going to take a look at the verb olla, ”to be”.
We will also go through how to talk about your nationality.
One of the first questions you might be asked in Finland is mistä sinä olet kotoisin?, “where are you from?”
Mistä is the question “from where?”,
and as you might remember from the earlier lessons, sinä is “you”.
olet is the conjugated form of the verb olla, “to be”
and kotoisin is another way to say “from”, or “be a native of”.
All together it's Mistä sinä olet kotoisin?
[slowly] Mistä sinä olet kotoisin?
There are a few different ways you can answer this question.
You can simply start with minä olen “I am”, and then add your nationality.
For example- Minä olen amerikkalainen
I am American.
[slowly] Minä olen amerikkalainen.
Just replace amerikkalainen with your own nationality.
Here are a few more.
"I’m German" is Minä olen saksalainen.
"I’m Italian" is Minä olen italialainen.
"I’m Russian" is Minä olen venäläinen.
Here’s another way you could answer. Start in the same way minä olen, and then add the case -sta to the end of the name of the country you are from. This would be the same as simply saying “I’m from-” in English.
For example, the word for France in Finnish is Ranska.
To say you're *from* France say-
Minä olen Ranskasta.
Here’s another one. Australia in Finnish is simply Australia.
To say you're *from* Australia say-
Minä olen Australiasta.
To keep the conversation going, you can ask your friend entä sinä? which means “how about you?”
Now it’s time for Paula’s Points.
There are some irregularities with conjugating the names of the countries. For example, if you would like to say “I’m from Russia”, instead of Minä olen Venäjästä, you would say Minä olen Venäjältä. Also, “I’m from England” would be Minä olen Englannista instead of Minä olen Englantista. This also applies to other countries ending with a -lanti, such as Skotlanti, Scotland, and Islanti, Iceland.
Now you can talk about your nationality and homeland in Finnish!
In the next lesson we will find out another usage for the verb olla. It is also used when talking about locations. So instead of saying where you are from, how would you say where you are now? We will get into the details in the next Suomea kolmessa minuutissa lesson.
Nähdään pian!

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