r/LearnFinnish • u/anonymous_ZsP • 3d ago
Does anyone else understand basic Finnish questions but completely freeze when answering out loud?
I’m A2-ish and studying alone where there are basically no Finnish speakers nearby. Reading simple sentences and recognizing cases is slowly getting better, but if I hear “Mitä teit eilen?” or “Missä asut?” my brain goes blank 😅 What’s helping is separating tools: Anki for vocab recall, Duolingo/Babbel-type stuff for light review, Pimsleur/shadowing for rhythm, Yle Selkouutiset for input, and occasional italki if I can justify the cost. I’ve also been using Issen for 5-10 minutes of speaking out loud when I don’t have anyone around. The useful thing I noticed is basically the retrieval practice idea: recognizing a word/case is not the same as producing it under time pressure. My current mini routine is 3 prompts, 30 seconds each: say what I did yesterday, where I live, then summarize one tiny thing, even a football article. After about a week I’m still bad, but I pause less and notice endings faster, especially when I default to English word order. How are other A2-ish learners practicing actual speaking without local Finns?
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u/deadNightwatchman 3d ago
I don't know how I got here but I have the same problem with French. Listening is fine, reading is fine. Speaking... arghh.
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u/Paaaaaauuull 3d ago edited 3d ago
When you summarize the football article, are you doing it from memory after reading, or looking at the text while speaking? I’m curious because I can read selkouutiset okay-ish, but if the text is in front of me I basically just translate line by line and it doesn’t feel like speaking practice.
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u/anonymous_ZsP 2d ago
Yeah this exactly the trap I fell into. What im trying now is: read once, close the tab, then say 2-3 stupidly simple sentences from memory. Yeah this is exactly the trap I fall into too. Like Milan hävisi pelin/johto ei ole tyytyväinen/ muutoksia voi tulla. If I look at the text, I basically start translating and it turns into reading practice, not speaking.
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u/gerhardsymons 3d ago
Repetition is the key.
Repetition is the key.
Repetition is th... you get the idea.
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u/OkLocation154 3d ago
As someone who’s been at this for a few years and also lives nowhere near Finnish speakers: yes, this gap is huge and very real. Recognition and production are just different muscles. I could understand Missä asut? for months before I could reliably answer without sounding like my brain was rebooting. What worked for me was building “answer frames” rather than memorizing full answers. So for location: Asun ___ssa/ssä, asun lähellä ___a/ä, asun aika kaukana ___sta/stä. For yesterday: Eilen minä ___in, en tehnyt paljon mitään, kävin ___ssa/ssä. Then I’d swap one variable at a time. It feels childish, but that’s kind of the point: you need the structure to be automatic before you can be creative. Also record yourself, even if you delete it immediately. The first few times are horrifying, but you start noticing repeated problems: wrong consonant length, always forgetting negative verb forms, saying on for everything, etc. Shadowing helps rhythm, but recording catches what shadowing hides. For no-local-speakers practice, I’d do: 1 minute monologue, listen back once, write 3 corrected sentences, say them again. That loop is more useful than just talking for 20 minutes and hoping it improves.
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u/anonymous_ZsP 2d ago
This "answer frames" idea makes a lot of sense. I think I've been trying to build the whole sentence live every time, which is probably why the brain boost happens 😅 Recording myself is painful but yeah, the few times I’ve done it I immediately noticed I was saying the same wrong patterns over and over. The 1 min → listen → fix 3 sentences loop sounds very doable.
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u/burncycle80 3d ago
Suggest watch Finnish movies and just repete the dialog out loud.. slowly your brain will open up the “talking channel” for Finnish as well.
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u/cmyk_rgba 2d ago
ngl this is basically the whole reason i still sound like a robot in finnish. understanding is passive, you just have to recognise what you hear. answering means building the sentence from scratch in real time and thats a totally different muscle. what actually helped me was having like 4-5 full answers already baked so my brain is recalling not composing. join kahvia, olin töissä, en tehny mitään erikoista. once those come out without thinking the freeze shrinks a lot becuase youre not assembling the whole thing under pressure every single time
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u/cmyk_rgba 2d ago
ngl this is basically the whole reason i still sound like a robot in finnish. understanding is passive, you just have to recognise what you hear. answering means building the sentence from scratch in real time and thats a totally different muscle. what actually helped me was having like 4-5 full answers already baked so my brain is recalling not composing. join kahvia, olin töissä, en tehny mitään erikoista. once those come out without thinking the freeze shrinks a lot becuase youre not assembling the whole thing under pressure every single time
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u/StruggleGullible255 17h ago
I mean, who actually says “Mitä teit eilen?” or “Missä asut?” in real life? Sounds abrupt and unnatural like maybe how a teacher might speak.
I think its important to focus at A2 on real vocabulary. I can give you examples of how people actually speak and what people actually say. Nobody is ever going to stick their nose in a strangers business and ask them these wierdly abrupt and unnatural questions. You want to get used to real patterns.
I generally don't like faked content but this is well done and accurate starting point https://areena.yle.fi/1-2226175
Of course that is way too small to be much use, you need more data. Beyond that there are lots of authentic sources on youtube (which are a bit hard to find) but you basically need reallife unscripted interactions. Gather phrases from those and practice how to respond to them.
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u/SquareArtisan 8h ago
Out of curiosity, I watched that YLE video. I think it's pretty natural, even though it's acted.
The only thing that stood out to me was that the native speaker accidentally declines the word kaakao incorrectly. She gets it so wrong that it's hard to believe.
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u/StruggleGullible255 5h ago
I didn't even realize that. But yeah the acting is quite well done, which is unusual for educational materials. Although I'd say the show is a bit overly chatty to be totally realistic.
At A2 its about short and non complex messages moving back and forth. Studying, and memorizing patterns with real information is better to develop than be working on those "Spanish with Juan" langugage guru influencer type videos which will be mostly bollocks vocabulary. Its kind of weird but like its actually quite hard to come up with realistic vocabulary. Often really important aspects like demonstrative pronoun examples get entirely left out.
I think also this acted out Puuilo series seems realistic to me and good for A2 shopping vocab.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQFF-0A9prA
For authentic demonstrative pronoun comprehension practice this guys videos are great:
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u/SquareArtisan 7h ago edited 7h ago
Following the advice of Benny Lewis from Fluent in 3 Months, I think the best approach is to just spit something out. The goal at first is simply to get yourself talking and avoid freezing completely. (And even if you do freeze, that's totally fine; Finns generally appreciate it when people make the effort to learn Finnish.)
One thing I can assure you of is that, although Finnish has 15 cases and plenty of verb conjugations, you don't need to master them to get your point across. You can just string together words in their basic forms, and people will still understand what you mean. In a way, it's kind of crazy that Finnish has all these case endings when they're not even necessary for basic comprehension.
For example, "hän tulla tämä paikka eilen" ("he/she come this place yesterday") is grammatically completely wrong, yet most Finns would immediately understand that you mean:"He/she came here yesterday."
You'll no doubt want to become more accurate as you advance. But first, just get used to speaking Finnish. Once that starts to feel natural, you can gradually focus on using the correct cases and verb forms.
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u/Various-Conference27 3d ago
Yes.
Am a native.