Learn how to use Finnish adjectives
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| 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 use the verb olla, “to be” or "to have," in the negative form. |
| In this lesson, we will learn some Finnish adjectives and how to use them. |
| Basically, placing the adjective in the sentence works the same way as in English. Therefore, if you simply want to say “The car is red” it would be |
| Auto on punainen. |
| And saying “I have a red car” is |
| Minulla on punainen auto. |
| Now you also learned the word for “red”, punainen. |
| The adjectives also change according to the grammatical cases, which we were talking about in previous lessons. |
| As there are many different kinds of adjectives, they all tend to conjugate a bit differently. However, many adjectives have the ending -nen. Like sininen, “blue”, iloinen, “happy”, tavallinen, “normal”. These have the same conjugation. Let’s see an example with the word sininen. |
| When you start conjugating an adjective that ends with -nen, it changes into a new stem. |
| Sinise-. To this stem, you add the case endings. |
| Let’s see a few examples of commonly used cases for adjectives. |
| To indicate some sort of change or transformation, we use the ending -ksi. |
| For example, “I painted the wall blue.” is |
| Minä maalasin talon siniseksi. |
| Here you see the word sininen in it’s new form sinise-, and the ending -ksi added. Siniseksi. |
| Often the adjective has the same case as the noun it is connected to. For example in the sentence “You live in a big house”, you would have to change both the adjective and the noun. Sinä asut isossa talossa. |
| Here we added the ending -ssa to indicate where something is happening. |
| Now here’s a good case to remember. When you describe how something looks, smells or feels, you usually use the ending -lta. |
| Let’s see an example with the word iloinen, that we learned earlier. Do you still remember how to change the -nen ending? Iloinen would be iloiselta. |
| Tyttö näyttää iloiselta. |
| This means, “the girl looks happy”. |
| Or, if you want to say “The food tastes good”, you would say |
| Ruoka maistuu hyvältä. |
| Because the word hyvä has ä instead of a, remember that it becomes hyvältä! |
| Now let’s find out how to turn an adjective from singular to plural. It also varies according to the case, but let’s take a few basic examples. |
| If you simply want to say “the red cars”, you add the ending -t. Like we learned before, punainen is “red”, and changing the stem of the word it becomes punaise-, and adding the -t, punaiset. |
| Punaiset autot. |
| The other common way to make a word plural is with the ending -a, -ia or -ja. |
| Punaisia autoja. |
| or making it a fuller sentence |
| Autot ovat punaisia. “The cars are red.” |
| Here are some examples with adjectives without the -nen ending. Let’s take iso, “big”. |
| The sentence talo on iso, means “the house is big”. So how would you change it to plural? Because the adjective ends with an -o, it gets the ending -ja. |
| Talot ovat isoja. |
| The word for “new” is uusi. As it ends with an -i, the plural ending is -a. So the sentence “These books are new” would be |
| Nämä kirjat ovat uusia. |
| Now it’s time for Paula’s Points. |
| When you want to emphasize the adjective you are talking about, you can add the word tosi in front of it. It means “really”. For example, tosi hyvä elokuva, “a really good movie”, or tosi kaunis maisema, “really beautiful scenery”. |
| In this lesson, we learned some commonly used adjectives and basic grammatical cases. |
| Next time we’ll learn the basic uses of the verb mennä, which means "to go”. |
| I’ll be waiting for you in the next Suomea kolmessa minuutissa lesson. |
| Nähdään pian! |
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