I had a lovely, hot and sunny month of July and am back! This is Part 2 of my answer to Boglárka. Part one lives here. 

Boglárka writes: 

I haven't really found a good translation for mennä puihin, could you help me out with that? 

The literal translation for mennä puihin would be "to go into the trees", and it means more or less to fail completely or to go very wrong: 

Projekti meni puihin. 
'The project failed.'

A quick googling revealed an interesting second meaning that I don't personally remember ever hearing before, but that my spouse Janne says is the primary meaning for him: 

Menin ihan puihin hänet nähdessäni
 'I froze completely when I saw him'

​In this context, mennä puihin means being unable to speak or do anything in an important situation, like meeting someone you admire for the first time. Basically a deer in headlights moment. So my suggestions for translating mennä puihin would be to fail, to go wrong or to have a deer in headlights moment, depending on context.

Mennä puihin seems to me to be closely related to another tree themed expression of failing, mennä metsään "to go into the forest":

 Mun arvaus meni ihan metsään.
Literally: My guess went completely into the forest. 
'My guess was totally wrong.'​

Happy July everyone! I'm off to my very own mökki were I plan to focus on sleep, sauna and swimming. 

See you in August, nähdään elokuussa!

Here's the view I'll be looking at all month. 

 Note: This post contains discussion of the human body and genitalia. I'll try not to gross you out too much, but proceed at your own caution!  

Boglárka writes: 

​Moikka! My Finnish teacher recommended your awesome blog and it indeed seems terribly useful, so thank you for writing it! I also have a question, I've come across the word munaskuu lately and looking it up in several dictionaries I've become quite confused about how exactly it's used. it seems like the translations ranged from guts (like in gut feeling) to kidney and testis. are all of these correct? also, I haven't really found a good translation for mennä puihin, could you help me out with that? thanks a bunch in advance and also for your great work with the blog!

Heippa Boglárka!

Thank you for your kind words and really interesting questions! I'll start with the first one and save "mennä puihin" for another post, so this one doesn't become much too long. 

You've got the general meaning right: munaskuu can refer to vague anatomy, hence the translations kidney and testis. Munaskuu doesn't directly refer to the gut, but that's also one possible translation. In English you'd say that you feel something in your gut, but in Finnish you could say that you feel it in your kidneys, tunnen sen munaskuissani.  However, it's much more common to feel something in your gut in English than it is to feel something in your kidneys in Finnish. 

The original meaning of the word seems to be 'kidney', but to me personally the primary meaning is definitely 'testis' or 'testicle', and a quick google search reveals that this is not just a personal quirk of mine. Before receiving your question, I thought that the standard written form of the word was munasku, with just one u, and this form yields a lot more male genitalia than munaskuu on google. You've been warned!

When I look at the search results for munasku and munaskuu, I'm also no longer that confident that munasku and munaskuu are even the same word - I mean, they certainly come from the same origins, but they're written differently and seem to have surprisingly different meanings. Munaskuu, according to Institute for the Languages of Finland, is definitely kidney and invokes biblical and generally old fashioned literary connotations. The first written instances are from Agricola. Munasku, on the other hand, primarily seems to mean testis and is much more vulgar - maybe old fashioned, also, but not in a high brow let alone biblical way. It's more like something that an older man might say while drinking Koskenkorva by the wood pile (a time honored Finnish tradition).

Ihab asks:
​What does the word maku maku mean? 

Moi Ihab!

The short answer: maku  means taste. Just like in English, it can mean the taste of food as well as a person's taste or sense of style.  

Kielitoimiston sanakirja is a wonderful, free Finnish dictionary published by the Institute for the Languages of Finland. If you haven't yet, check it out! It's all in Finnish and geared towards advanced speakers, but it can be useful from the very beginning.

According to Kielitoimiston sanakirja, maku has four distinct meanings or uses:

1. It's the experience of flavor. Maku is what you feel when you are eating: sweetness, saltiness, acidity, but also coffee, bread, grapefruit or cucumber. 

Tässä on palaneen maku. 
Tämä+inessive be+3rd person singular palanut+genitive maku+nominative. 
Literally: There's the taste of burnt in this. 
This tastes burnt. 

However, a more frequent way to express this meaning is by using the verb maistua, 'to taste', which can be used with both the ablative (Miltä?) and allative cases (Mille?), which mean the exact same thing:

Ruoka maistuu hyvältä. 
Ruoka+nominative maistua+3rd person singular + hyvä+ablative. 
Literally, it would be something like: Food tastes of goodness. 
The actual translation: The food tastes good. 

The choice between ruoka maistuu hyvältä and ruoka maistuu hyvälle depends on one's unique use of language or idolect. Some Finns stick strictly to one or the other, some use both. Originally, it was a regional difference, with one version in eastern Finland and the other in the west. 

2. A metaphorical experience of flavor. In English, you might say that something left a bad taste in your mouth, perhaps after a job  interview  with a sketchy company or a meeting with an unpleasant person. In Finnish, we use maku in pretty much the same way. 

Haastattelusta jäi huono maku suuhun.
Haastattelu+elative jäädä+past tense huono+nominative maku+nominative suu+illative
Literally: From the interview, a bad taste remained in my mouth. 
Actual translation: The interview left a bad taste in my mouth. 

3. A person's individual sense of flavour or taste. 

Lisää suolaa maun mukaan. 
Lisätä+2nd person imperative suola+partitive maku+genitive mukaan. 
What the words mean: add salt taste according
Actual translation: Add salt according to taste. 

4. A person's individual sense of style. This is another meaning that is pretty much the exact equivalent of how we would use the English word taste.

Ihabilla on hyvä maku. 
Ihab+adessive olla+3rd person hyvä+nominative maku+nominative
Ihab has good taste. 

Maistuu tuliselta. 
Tastes spicy, literally "tastes fiery."

Omar asks:
What is the difference between the words "pilalla" and "raunio"? 

Hi Omar!

I think I see where the confusion comes from - when you look up the English word ruin or ruined, both of these come up as possible translations.

The ruin you were probably looking for is pilalla, which is the general word that means that something is no longer usable: 

Laitoin keittoon aivan liikaa pippuria. Nyt se on pilalla. 
I put way too much pepper in the soup. It's ruined now. 

Raunio, on the other hand, means a ruin of a building. Here's a raunio: 

Picture by Hasan Cilingir

​The word raunio is often used in the essive case, which is the case we use for states of being:

Rakennus on rauniona.
Rakennus on raunio-na. 
The building be-3rd person ruin-essive. 
The building is in ruins.

I've answered a couple of questions about choosing the right case to use (you can find them here and here). In each of these posts, I've been talking about the concept of ainesana,  but I haven't really devoted time to explaining what they are and how to recognize them. So here goes!

The word ainesana is composed of two words, aine 'material, element' and sana 'word'. Ainesana literally means an "element word" or "material word", and its English counterpart is the uncountable noun. However, unlike in English, in Finnish it's often less useful to think of these words in terms of counting. In my experience, it's often more useful to think about dividing, and some Finnish grammars use the term jaollinen, 'divisible' to mean the same thing - if you can divide it, it's an ainesana. Ainesanas behave a bit differently than other words, especially when it comes to using the partitive case. 

The following groups of nouns are ainesanas:

1) food and drink: kahvi 'coffee', juusto 'cheese', mehu 'juice', leipä 'bread'
2) elements and materials: vesi 'water', nahka 'leather', tuli 'fire'
3) abstract concepts and feelings: rakkaus 'love', ystävyys 'friendship', ilo 'joy'

Ainesanas are things that you can stick into a blender and mush up without them losing their essence. A mashed potato is still a potato, but stick your cellphone (not an ainesana) into your vitamix and what you get is a pile of broken plastic, glass and metal. Love remains love even when your heart is broken.

Another way to phrase the same idea is that with ainesanas, even the tiniest bit of the thing is still the thing. If you pour some coffee into a coffee cup, you now have coffee in a cup as well as in a coffee pot. Cut up a cake, kakku, and dish it out and you have lots of plates with cake. If you cut up a t-shirt in a similar way you end up with garbage, not a t-shirt, but the shards are still fabric, kangas, which of course is, again, an ainesana.  

If you can divide it without it losing its essence, it's an ainesana. If you can't, it's not. 

​

Every April, I'm amazed at how Finnish is spring is pretty much identical with Belgian winter. I grew up in Belgium, where usually April means green grass, leaves and flowers. In Helsinki, April means +7 degrees and everything being grey and brown. At the moment, it's raining. But we had some beautiful days last week, and Vappu is just around the corner! Can't wait! On to the question of the day: 

Omar writes: 
Mitä tarkoittaa "nimenomaan" ?!  What does "nimenomaan "mean?! 

Dear Omar, 

Great question! Nimenomaan is one of those words that emphasizes and defines meaning, and as such it's pretty hard to translate accurately. Nimeomaan can be translated as exactly, absolutely, totally, precisely, in particular. 

You can use it to say that someone understands exactly what you mean. In this example that I just made up, Maija and Aarne are having coffee. 

Maija:  Tää on ihana kahvila.
Aarne: Joo, mistään ei saa näin hyviä korvapuusteja!
Maija:  Nimenomaan!

Maija: I love this café (literally: this café is wonderful). 
Aarne: Yeah, you can't get korvapuustis this good anywhere!
Maija: Exactly!

You can also use it to single something out: 

Maija: Tää on ihana kahvila.
Aarne: Joo, nimenomaan korvapuustit on täällä tosi hyviä!

Maija: I love this café. 
Aarne: Yeah, the korvapuustis in particular are really good here!

To emphasize: 

Maija: Mihin me mentäis kahville? 
Aarne: En mä tiiä, oisko Cafe Laine mitään? 
Maija: Mun tekis nimenomaan mieli korvapuustia. 
Aarne: No mut hei sit mä tiedän hyvän paikan!

Maija: Where do you want to have coffee? 
Aarne: I don't know, how about Café Laine?
Maija: I'm really craving a korvapuusti. 
Aarne: Well in that case I know just the place!

In most cases, in particular works pretty nicely as a translation for nimenomaan, so if I had to choose one word to translate it with, that would be my favorite. 

Nyt tekee mieli nimenomaan korvapuustia, ei mitä tahansa pullaa!

Aina writes:

Hi! I am a PhD student at Helsinki University. I am originally from Barcelona. I am currently learning finnish at the classes offered at the university, but I would like to find some lessons that are more direct to speaking and getting vocabulary, rather than learning grammar (as the ones I am currenly in). Could you recomend me any? Kiitos paljon!

Hi Aina!

There are a bunch of excellent courses that you could attend, but I don't currently have a specific one in mind. For the Helsinki region, the options should all be listed on finnishcourses.fi. In practice, not everything is always there, so it's also worth asking around. For instance, I've never listed one of my own private courses, as my one woman business is such a small player in the field and I haven't yet had the need to advertise much. 

Look for a course that has speaking (puhuminen) right in the name of the course. However, most courses will have a lot of speaking and vocabulary involved even if they don't specifically focus on it, so it might be a good idea to contact the organizer and ask them about it directly. It sounds like your current course might be a bit of an outlier, so you might also want to check out what else is available at the uni. Maybe ask your current teacher for recommendations if you haven't done that yet. 

There are also several free clubs that you can attend to practice speaking and vocabulary, usually lead by teacher students or even professional teachers. For example, my part-time employer Helsingin työväenopisto hosts one on Mondays from 10.00-11.30 in Kallio, Helsinginkatu 26. In my time at the uni in Helsinki, we had several Finnish clubs going on, so that's another good place to start looking.  

Finally, there's of course the option of private lessons, which are an excellent way of focusing on exactly the aspects of language that you need. I'm one good option for focusing on speaking (even if I say so myself), but there are many excellent Finnish teachers in Helsinki who offer private lessons. I also organize Finnish courses for groups. Let me know if you're interested and we can talk more!

Readers, anything I missed? Do you have a specific course recommendation for Aina? Tell us in the comments!

This is the second part of my answer to Meri's letter. Part one is here.  ​Here's Meri's letter again:

Hi Mari,

I have some questions regarding the verb ostaa and the behavior of some nouns and the endings they take. Ostaako Peter bussilipun? Minä ostan maitoa/ jäätelöä. Assuming that the sentences are correct, which I think they are, why is it that with the same verb variations to the noun are possible? What is the difference? When do we know which variation to use? Here are my suggestions/ problems. I know that the partitive case is used for nouns that cannot be counted Maito is one such noun. You cannot count the milk, but the containers in which it is stored. However, as I see it, jäätelö can be counted, or am I wrong? One more thing. How do say that I want for example to buy tickets to a concert, for one, then the tickets to a particular concert? Would these be correct? Minä haluan ostaa lipput. Minä haluan ostaa lippuja. Thanks,

Hi Meri!

Why is it that with the same verb variations to the noun are possible? This is a question that one could write a doctoral thesis on, and actually, many have. I'll try my very best not to. 

You already gave the short answer yourself: with a verb like ostaa 'to buy', we need to look at the thing that we're buying. If it's countable, we use the genetive, just like in your example: Ostaako  Peter bussilipun.  If it's not countable, or in Finnish, an ainesana, then you use the partitive.

Ainesanas are things that you can't count: food, drink, elements and abstract things, like 

vesi, tuli, rakkaus  'water, fire and love'. 

Just like you said in your letter, ainesanas can be conceptualized as countables: instead of milk, which is an ainesana or uncountable, we can talk about cartons of milk and transform our milk into countable form: 

Ostan maitoa. 'I'm buying milk'
Ostan maidon.  'I'm buying a carton of milk.'

The same goes for jäätelö, and any ainesana for that matter. From you're letter, I'm guessing that you're thinking about individual ice creams. Think of big batches of gelato instead, or tubs of Ben & Jerry's. 

Ostan jäätelöä. 'I'm buying ice cream.'
Ostan jäätelön. 'I'm buying an ice cream.'

On a more general level, how do you choose the case? 

When you're first starting to study Finnish, the way we use our 15 cases may seem completely random and very confusing, but there's actually a method behind what may at times seem like madness. It has everything to do with the action you're describing, or, the verb you're using. 

Some verbs go strictly with one case, like tykätä  'to like'. Tykätä always goes with the elative case (Mistä?): 

Minä tykkään sinusta. 
Minä tykkää-n sinu-sta.

First there's the word minä 'I', in its nominative or basic form, then the verb tykätä 'to like'  in the form that goes with minä,  the first person singular: tykkään 'I like'. Then sinä  'you' in the elative form, sinusta. So literally: I like "from you", or my liking of you comes from the way you are. I like you.

Other verbs are more flexible, like the verb ostaa  that we started off with. Ostaa is a transitive verb, a verb that typically takes an object: you always buy something, and what case you should use depends on the thing you're buying: ainesana or not? If you're not buying anything in particular, there's a whole different verb for that: shoppailla. 

So, you might saying, it's another f***** learn it by heart situation isn't it??? 

Well, you're right, it is. On the other hand, it's also not - when you progress further, you'll start to grasp the underlying logic, and you'll start to see that verbs with similar meanings behave in the same way. For example, this thing about liking from may seem totally random at first, but when you learn more verbs you start seeing a pattern: 

tykkään suklaasta
'I like chocolate.'
pidän suklaasta
'I like chocolate.' (pidän and tykkään are synonyms)
nautin  suklaasta
'I enjoy chocolate.'
uneksin suklaasta
'I dream of chocolate.'
 
In my opinion, the trick in the beginning is learning slightly longer chunks of language. Instead of memorizing tykätä + elatiivi, use it in a a longer sentence or phrase and then memorize that. If you love chocolate like I do, it could be tykkään suklaasta.  

Once you know how to say you like chocolate, you also know how to say you like other things: 

tykkään suklaasta
tykkään kahvista
tykkään kesästä
tykkään Helsingistä (Helsinki : Helsingistä) 
... and so on. 

Tykkään mansikoista.

Meri writes: 

​Hi Mari,

I have some questions regarding the verb ostaa and the behavior of some nouns and the endings they take. Ostaako Peter bussilipun? Minä ostan maitoa/ jäätelöä. Assuming that the sentences are correct, which I think they are, why is it that with the same verb variations to the noun are possible? What is the difference? When do we know which variation to use? Here are my suggestions/ problems. I know that the partitive case is used for nouns that cannot be counted Maito is one such noun. You cannot count the milk, but the containers in which it is stored. However, as I see it, jäätelö can be counted, or am I wrong? One more thing. How do say that I want for example to buy tickets to a concert, for one, then the tickets to a particular concert? Would these be correct? Minä haluan ostaa lipput. Minä haluan ostaa lippuja. Thanks,

Hi Meri!

Thanks for the great questions! I'll start with the second one, which is easier and faster to answer: 

How do say that I want for example to buy tickets to a concert, for one, then the tickets to a particular concert?  Would these be correct? Minä haluan ostaa lipput. Minä haluan ostaa lippuja. 

Your suggestions are almost correct, just remember the kpt-change for the word lippu:

In a word like lippu (I call this the KATTO word type), if your have two p's in the nominative, the word loses a p in the plural nominative (t-plural) form: Minä haluan ostaa liput  'I want to buy the tickets'. 

If you use the plural partitive, Minä haluan ostaa lippuja, it means that you want to buy some tickets. In English, I'd say I want to buy tickets. 

With the plural nominative, Minä haluan ostaa liput, the sentence means that you want to buy specific tickets, and the English equivalent would be I want to buy the tickets. 

My completely unresearched, subjective feeling is that in English, I want to buy tickets  would usually be the way to go - in a lot of contexts, I want to buy the tickets would seem oddly specific, like you had some very specific seats in mind and no other tickets to the same concert will do. You'd use the tickets  only if you'd already been discussing some specific tickets already, like this: 

Anneli: I really wanna go see Maria Gasolina  next week! I wonder if there are any tickets left!
Heidi: OMG me too! 
Anneli: I'll find out and get us tickets if there are still some left. 
Heidi: Awesome!

 later:

Anneli: Guess what, I got the tickets! 

In Finnish, however, the default in many contexts would be Minä haluan ostaa liput, and Minä haluan ostaa lippuja  would be used to emphasize that the amount of tickets is nonspecific. So the same conversation would go something like this: 

Anneli: Mä haluun mennä Maria Gasolinan keikalle ens viikolla! Onkohan sinne vielä lippuja jäljellä? 
Heidi: Et oo tosissas, niin mäkin!
Anneli: Mä otan selvää ja hankin meille liput jos niitä on vielä jäljellä. 
Heidi: Upeeta!
 
myöhemmin:

Anneli: Arvaa mitä, mä sain ne liput! 

As you can see, for the Finnish version I used the pronoun ne  to emphasize that we're talking about specific tickets that have been mentioned before, whereas in English the article does the trick. 

Well, that was a lot of detail for a simple question! I hope I didn't manage to just make it sound even more confusing. The bottom line is, both are correct, and which one is better depends on the specific context, which you will start to get a handle on as you progress. You'll sound good and make yourself understood anyway. Feel free to continue the conversation in the comments if you need any more clarification on this.

 For your first question, I'll make a second post, coming up soon!