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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 use some common Finnish adjectives.
In this lesson we will start a series of lessons dedicated to some of the most common Finnish verbs that you can’t avoid hearing!
The first verb in our series will be mennä, which means "to go".
First, let’s take a look at how this verb conjugates with different pronouns.
Minä menen, “I go”, sinä menet, “you go”, hän menee, “he or she goes”, me menemme, “we go”, te menette, “you go”, he menevät, “they go”.
If someone asks you Minne sinä menet viikonloppuna? That means "Where are you going for the weekend?".
So if you would be going to your summer cottage, you would say Minä menen mökille.
Let’s break down this answer.
First we had-
Minä menen which is "I am going..."
After that came the word for the place where many Finns spend their summer weekends, mökki, a cottage. And to indicate that you are going to the cottage, you add the ending -lle. When adding an ending to a word with the double consonant K, as in mökki, you need to drop one of the consonants off, so the final form would be mökille.
The ending -lle is used in words such as rannalle, “to the beach”, kaupungille, “to the city”, or toimistolle, “to the office”. But it is not the only case used to indicate where you are going. The other one is the ending: vowel + n.
Lets see how it works. The word for “school” is koulu. You have to make the last letter a double vowel, and add -n. Kouluun.
Here’s another example. You are going to Helsinki, so you have to make the last letter a double vowal, and add -n.
Minä menen Helsinkiin.
[slowly] Minä menen Helsinkiin.
Or if you are going to the zoo, which in Finnish is eläintarha, you would say
Minä menen eläintarhaan.
[slowly] Minä menen eläintarhaan.
Now it’s time for Paula’s Points.
Do you still remember the verb aikoa that we used in lesson 10? It means “going to”, and is often paired with the word mennä. So if you ask your friend Minne sinä aiot mennä viikonloppuna, it would mean “where are you going to go on the weekend.” This makes the sentence sound a little bit softer.
Another good verb to pair with mennä is ajatella, “to think”. So if you are not yet 100% sure of your plans, you can say,
Minä ajattelin mennä puistoon, which literally means “I was thinking of going to the park”.
So, in this lesson, we learned how to use the verb mennä and match it with a grammatical case.
Next time we’ll learn another very useful verb, tehdä.
Do you know what this verb means? I’ll be waiting for you with the answer in the next Suomea kolmessa minuutissa lesson.
Nähdään pian!

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