sisu
SEE-soo
Stubborn courage that shows up after hope is gone
Not bravery in the moment. The thing that makes you continue afterwards.
Finland treats it as a national characteristic rather than a virtue.
The archive
Finnish
Fifteen cases and no future
A language that builds sentences by stacking endings onto a stem until the stem is barely visible.
FamilyUralic › Finnish
ScriptLatin
Speakers5M 5M native · 0k second
Weeks to a working level44 Rated at 44 weeks, though it is usually named alongside Hungarian as the hard end of that group. Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.
The first hundred words cover37.5% and the first thousand 65.2%
- Fifteen cases. Where English uses in, into, out of, onto and at, Finnish uses endings.
- There is no future tense. The present handles it, and context does the rest.
- No grammatical gender, and a single pronoun, hän, for he and she.
- Vowels come in two teams and a word normally sticks to one of them, which is why endings change shape depending on the stem.
- It is not related to Swedish or Russian, its neighbours on both sides. Its family runs east to Estonia and Hungary.
Fifteen cases, no relation to any neighbour, and sisu: the word for courage after hope is gone. The seventh language that actually teaches you something new. Saunas, silence and heavy metal per capita records: Finland keeps ranking happiest country on Earth, and the language is the way in.
Words with no translation
kalsarikänni
KAL-sa-ri-ken-ni
Drinking at home, in your underwear, with no intention of going anywhere
underpants drunk
Finland liked this concept enough to issue it as an official emoji, twice, one figure for each gender.
The point is not the drink. The point is the total absence of anywhere to be.
löyly
LEU-lu
The wave of steam off the sauna stones, and the spirit inside it
In older Finnish the word meant spirit, or breath of life, and it still does in the neighbouring languages.
Which is why you do not make steam in a sauna. You throw the water, and the löyly comes.
Next to its neighbours
Where Finnish parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.
Where to practise it
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Finnish with.
The Finnish Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Stories in Finnish
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.