Nathan DykesWould anyone in the #linguistics sphere or elsewhere have tips on learning Finnish?
I'd be starting from basically nothing and would be working on my own for now. I can work with materials in English, German or Swedish.
Valju Hiltunen@na_sy_tr i'm not an S2 teacher so i don't really know what kind of material is available and what of it is really recommendable. but as a university teacher of finnish i'm not totally ignorant of the topic.
so, here's something that i found easily, and perhaps you've found these yourself already:
https://yle.fi/aihe/oppiminen/suomen-kielen-alkeet
https://areena.yle.fi/1-3882033
https://sites.google.com/view/superalkeet/etusivu
https://infofinland.fi/en/finnish-and-swedish/finnish-online
@na_sy_tr one important thing to pay attention to when learning finnish is that written finnish and spoken finnish are quite different beasts. it's a bit like how it's with arabic: there's modern standard arabic that is used in the news and so, and then there are the local spoken variants.
@na_sy_tr so, if you need to get the hang of official or written communication, concentrate on written finnish, but if you want to interact casually, go for spoken finnish. if there's no mention if a material is about written or spoken, it's usually about written.
@Stoori Thank you, this is very helpful! I'll probably aim for both eventually, but for now, anything that helps get a sense of some basics is great, as i might be looking to spend quite a lot of time there in around six months.
David Weir@Stoori I once had (and gave away) a copy of Kato hei: puhekielen alkeet by Maarit Berg and Leena Silfverberg, which tries to teach spoken Finnish from scratch as a self-contained thing.
I had it mostly for novelty interest, from my own experiences (albeit as someone who lives here and only speaks and listens at B2 on a good day) I wouldn't really recommend it on its own, despite it being intended as a standalone textbook.
It was more a useful way of understanding all the things people around you are saying, systematically – once one has the formal written language fairly well understood.
And it teaches one normative version of spoken Finnish (kind of-Helsinki), while the better general textbooks I used gave examples from different regions when appropriate to the learner's level.
@davidjamesweir Thank you! I've been dabbling with the WordDriver app the last few days, which seems quite well-made for what it is -- and notes written/spoken differences for common terms as well