Teach Yourself Finnish - 2 Audio CDs and Book
Brand New (still shrink wrapped): 2 CDs and Book
Teach Yourself Finnish is the course for anyone who wants to progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking and writing Finnish with confidence. Although aimed at those with no previous knowledge, it is equally suitable for anyone wishing to brush up existing knowledge for a holiday or business trip. Key structures and vocabulary are introduced in 18 thematic units progressing from introducing yourself and dealing with everyday situations to talking about work and driving in Finland. The first five units are a survival package. They give a basic introduction to the kind of language you need when you visit the country. In the later units you will become familiar with many aspects of Finnish life as well as the language. The emphasis is on communication throughout with important language structures introduced through dialogues on the accompanying recording. There are plenty of exercises to practise the language as it is introduced and tips throughout to help with grammar. Cultural information boxes give useful advice and information for anyone planning a trip to Finland.
The new edition has been updated and is now accompanied by a double CD with extra audio material. Popular features of the previous edition have been retained:
- English-Finnish vocabulary
- glossary of grammatical terms
- a 'taking it further' section to direct learners to further sources of real Finnish
* this course will appeal to beginners as well as those who want to refresh existing knowledge
* for learners who want to progress quickly beyond the basics to a level where they can communicate with confidence
* the course covers topics that will appeal to those learning for holiday and business purposes
* double CD of the audio material
About the Author:
Terttu Leney is an experienced teacher, teacher trainer, translator and broadcaster of Finnish. She has taught Finnish in various firms and language schools, at Chelsea & Westminster Adult Education Institute, the University of Surrey and has been teaching Finnish at the Foreign Office in London for over twenty years. She has taught several generations of UK diplomats to Helsinki. She has also been a freelance broadcaster for the Finnish section of the BBC World Service and Examinations Administrator for Language Testing Associates, London. In 1996 she gained a Postgraduate Diploma in Current Developments in Language Training from the University of Westminster.
About the Finnish Language 
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. It is one of the official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a Finnish dialect, are spoken. The Kven language, which is closely related to Finnish, is an official minority language in Norway. Finnish is the eponymous member of the Finno-Ugric language family and is typologically between fusional and agglutinative languages. It modifies and inflects the forms of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, depending on their roles in the sentence. Finnish is a member of the Baltic-Finnic subgroup of the Finno-Ugric group of languages which in turn is a member of the Uralic family of languages. The Baltic-Finnic subgroup also includes Estonian and other minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea.
* Shared basic vocabulary displaying regular sound correspondences with the other Uralic languages
Several theories exist as to the geographic origin of Finnish and the other Uralic languages, but the most widely held view is that they originated as a Proto-Uralic language somewhere in the boreal forest belt around the Ural Mountains region and/or the bend of the middle Volga. The strong case for Proto-Uralic is supported by common vocabulary with regularities in sound correspondences, as well as by the fact that the Uralic languages have many similarities in structure and grammar.
It has been posited that speakers of a Finno-Ugric language have been living in the region of current Finland since at least 3000 BC. The Finns are more genetically similar to their Indo-European speaking neighbors than to the speakers of the geographically close Finno-Ugric language, Sami. Therefore it has been argued that a native Finnic population absorbed northward migrating Indo-Europeans who adopted the Finnic language, giving rise to the modern Finns.Finnish is spoken by about six million people that reside mainly in Finland. There are also notable Finnish-speaking minorities in Sweden, Norway, Russia, Estonia, Canada, and the United States. The majority of the population of Finland, 91.51% as of 2006, speak Finnish as their first language. The remainder speak Swedish (5.5%), Sami (Northern, Inari, Skolt) and other languages. It has achieved some popularity as a second language in EstoniaIt is believed that the Balto-Finnic languages evolved from a proto-Finnic language, from which Sami was separated around 1500-1000 BC. Current research indicates there were three or more proto-Finnic dialects. The Baltic Finnic languages separated around the 1st century, but continued to influence each other. Therefore, the Eastern Finnish dialects are genetically Eastern proto-Finnic, with many Eastern features, and the Southwestern Finnish dialects have many genuine Estonian influences.
Finland was annexed to Catholic Sweden in the Middle Ages. Prior to this, Finnish was an oral language. The language of business was Middle Low German, the language of administration Swedish, and religious activities were held in Latin, leaving few possibilities for Finns to use their mother tongue in situations other than daily chores. The first known written example of Finnish comes from this era and was found in a German travel journal dating back to c.1450: Mynna tachton gernast spuho somen gelen Emyna dayda (Modern Finnish: "Minä tahdon kernaasti puhua suomen kieltä, [mutta] en minä taida"; English: "I willingly want to speak Finnish, [but] I cannot"). According to the travel journal, a Finnish bishop, whose name is unknown, was behind the above quotation.
The first comprehensive writing system for Finnish was created by Mikael Agricola, a Finnish bishop, in the 16th century. He based his orthography on Swedish, German, and Latin. His ultimate plan was to translate the Bible, but first he had to define rules on which the Finnish standard language still relies, particularly with respect to spelling. He also invented single-handedly many words such as armo meaning both "mercy" and "grace" (as in "from grace alone, not out of good works...") and vanhurskas "righteous". More than fifty percent of these words are still in use. Agricola's written language was based on western dialects of Finnish, and his intention was that each phoneme should correspond to one letter. Yet, Agricola was confronted with many problems in this endeavour, failing to achieve uniformity. This is why he might use different signs for the same phonemes depending on the situation. For example he used dh or d to represent the voiced dental fricative /ð/ (English th in this) and tz or z to represent the geminate unvoiced dental fricative /θ/ (the th in thin). Additionally, Agricola might use gh or g to represent the voiced velar fricative /ɣ/ and either ch, c or h for /h/. For example he wrote techtin against modern spelling tehtiin. Later others revised Agricola's work, striving for a more phonetical system. In the process, Finnish ended up losing some of its phonemes. The sounds /ð/ and /θ/ disappeared from the standard language, surviving only in a small rural region in Western Finland. Elsewhere traces of these phonemes persist as their disappearance gave Finnish dialects their distinct qualities. For example, it has been deduced that the /θ/ sound became ht or tt (e.g. meþþä → mehtä, mettä) in the eastern dialects and in some western dialects.
Modern Finnish punctuation, along with that of Swedish, uses the colon character (:) to separate the stem of the word and its grammatical ending in some cases (such as after abbreviations), where some other alphabetic writing systems would use an apostrophe. Suffixes are required for correct grammar, so this is often applied, e.g. EU:ssa "in the EU". Elias Lönnrot as depicted in a 19th century caricature — Lönnrot made several journeys to Karelia and Eastern Finland to collect folklore, from which he compiled the Kalevala. In the 19th century Johan Vilhelm Snellman and others began to stress the need to improve the status of Finnish. Ever since the days of Mikael Agricola written Finnish had been used almost exclusively in religious contexts, but now Snellman's Hegelian nationalistic ideas of Finnish as a full-fledged national language gained considerable support. Concerted efforts were made to improve the status of the language and to modernize it, and by the end of the century Finnish had become a language of administration, journalism, literature, and science in Finland, along with Swedish. The most important contributions to improving the status of Finnish were made by Elias Lönnrot. His impact on the development of modern vocabulary in Finnish was particularly crucial. In addition to compiling the Kalevala, he acted as an arbitrator in disputes about the development of standard Finnish between the proponents of western and eastern dialects, ensuring that the western dialects Agricola had preferred preserved their preeminent role, while many originally dialectical words from Eastern Finland were introduced to the standard language enriching it considerably. The first novel written in Finnish (and by a Finnish-speaker) was Seven Brothers, published by Aleksis Kivi in 1870. |
