Learn how to ask "Where?"
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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 ask the question "What" in Finnish. |
| This time, we are going to ask "Where" questions. |
| In Finnish, there are a few different words for this. They are Missä, minne and mihin. |
| Basically, missä is used to ask where something or someone is at the moment, whereas minne and mihin ask where someone is going. |
| Let’s have a look at these using some simple examples. |
| Here’s a good question you might hear and use a lot. Let’s say you’re calling your friend and want to know where she is. What do you say? |
| Missä sinä olet? |
| Where are you? |
| [slowly] Missä sinä olet? |
| So let’s break down this question. |
| First we had- |
| Missä, which is "Where", as we already learned. |
| And sinä olet is simply “you are”, like we have learned in earlier lessons. So this one was really easy, right? |
| Minne and mihin have the same meaning, which in English could be put as “where to”. In these questions you can use either one of them, it doesn’t make a difference! |
| In these examples I’ll use the word minne, but it could be replaced by mihin just as easily. |
| So let’s look at some questions that feature minne. |
| If you want to ask where you are going with your friends, you would just say Minne me menemme? |
| Where are we going? |
| [slowly] Minne me menemme? |
| You might remember the verb mennä from one of our previous lessons. |
| When you want to ask where someone is from, there is one more question word to remember in Finnish - mistä. |
| Mistä sinä olet kotoisin? |
| Where are you from? |
| [slowly] Mistä sinä olet kotoisin? |
| We practiced this one back in lesson 11. Do you remember? |
| Now it’s time for Paula’s Points. |
| In addition to these question words we are learning now, there is another way to spot a question. It is the ending -ko, which can be added to almost any word to make it a simple question. |
| For example, if you want to make the statement “You drive a car” into a question, you would ask “Do you drive a car?”, right? |
| In Finnish the statement would be Sinä ajat autoa. And when made into a question with the ending -ko, it would be Ajatko sinä autoa? |
| You can put the ending on the word you want to emphasize, but remember the question word must come first. Therefore, if you want to emphasize the word “you”, as in “is it really you who is driving the car”, you would change it to |
| Sinäkö ajat autoa? |
| Or if the ultimate question is that “Is it really a car that you are driving”, you would say |
| Autoako sinä ajat? |
| In this lesson, we learned the many different Finnish forms of the word “Where”. |
| Next time we will keep asking questions! We’ll be moving on to the word "When" in Finnish. Have you already guessed that it’s also short and starts with the letter M? You’ll find it out if you’re right in the next Suomea kolmessa minuutissa lesson. |
| Nähdään pian! |
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