Customer Reviews

Mastering Finnish

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Mastering Finnish is designed as a textbook for teaching Finnish in classroom settings (and can in fact be purchased with textbook-style binding), but it's also ideal for self-study at home. It offers a wealth of practical information on Finnish society and institutions in company with a systematic approach to building vocabulary and grammar, with numerous dialogues, narratives, grammatical notes, and exercises. Colloquial as well as standard written Finnish are covered. It also includes a detailed reference grammar. Vähämäki based his book on years of experience as a teacher of the Finnish language at University of Minnesota and at University of Toronto, where he currently director of the Finnish Studies Program and editor of the Journal of Finnish Studies. He's also a translator and editor, making Finnish-Canadian, and Finnish-American literature available to readers in English-speaking nations. (You can find others of his books here at Amazon.)

This is the first book that I bought in trying to learn Finnish. Along with this book I bought a Finnish to English dictionary. I found myself searching around the book and my dictionary constantly looking for words in the text. I got frustrated with this book and bought Teach Yourself Finnish by Terttu Leney, and it was a MUCH better book for learning Finnish. But still, there were gaps. I also bought Finnish, an essential grammer which filled in the gaps.

So my suggestion, is that if you want to learn Finnish, buy a Finnish to English dictionary, Teach Yourself Finnish by Terttu Leney, and Finnish: an essential grammer.

This is the text that is used in Lakehead University's Introductory Finnish (language) course. In the full-year course, we covered 10 chapters out of the book (it has something like 16 chapters in total), but also covered additional material prepared by the professor. I was a student in the course, and offer the following review from that point of view.

The good points: it is arranged conversationally. That is, each chapter introduces some new grammatical structure, but chapters are mostly divided by subject content - e.g. "A Visit to the Doctor", "Travel by Train and Bus", etc. I anticipate this to be incredibly useful for trips to Finland. As a class, we went to the local Finnish restaurant as a "Field Trip", and the Finnish-speaking waitress easily made herself understood to us, and we to her. I'm sure our grammer was simplistic, but the point of an introductory course is conveyance of information, not composition of epic poetry.

Another important point - the book avoids colloquial "Finnglish", which is apparently creeping into the language, especially in young people in the large cities (who are exposed to American/British TV, films, and music). The vocabulary is strictly "real" Finnish.

Unfortunately, there are a number of bad points. First and foremost is the lack of a universal glossary/word list - extremely frustrating!. Readers will require a Finnish-English dictionary. Secondly, the author uses grammatical terms that are not commonly known, at least to those that haven't taken a university-level course in English grammer or Latin. He throws around terms like "nominative", "genative", etc., without really defining what these terms are.

As a textbook, I think this is a fairly good one. As a stand-alone, teach yourself type book, I would be seriously hesitant about recommending it. Make sure you brush up on your grammatical terms beforehand, and get an English-Finnish dictionary, too.

I am a native Finnish speaker, and my husband is not. We purchased both the book and the CD, which I would highly recommend. Even with me being a native Finnish speaker, it was really useful for my husband to be able to hear the dialogues in Finnish, spoken at a normal conversational rate. I would highly recommend both the book and the CD.

The price is sound, and the package is very good.
You have to buy the cd together in order to get the best result.
Perhaps you should use it together with teach yourself finnish ( the old edition is the best, with a soap opera in many episodes, even if it's a little hard to cope ).

This is a great tool to help with pronunciation of the language. The conversations are all possible situations you may find yourself in (going to a party, purchasing train tickets, getting directions, visiting a doctor, shopping, etc.) and the pace of the spoken word is very true to life. This also makes a great addition to your favorite MP3 player and you can take the language anywhere. I find it helpful to just listen without the written words in front of me. Then follow along in the book (additional purchase), look up the translations in the back and listen again without the book. In no time you'll recognize words and even learn some of the funny songs that are included within the conversations. IHANA!

This is a very good introductory work in attaining proficiency in Finnish. Since Finnish is practically a minority language, there are very few course materials available in it and this is a valuable work. The one weakness I would say this text seems to have is that it doesn't seem very directed towards students in terms of the situations of the dialogues and the vocabulary worked on. A few chapters with more high frequency phrases and vocabulary useful for students laid out clearly (and voiced on the CDs) would be very useful.

Well worth hunting down as it's nice to have a range of course materials for Finnish as there isn't an awful lot out there. Very comprehensive enabling the student to have quite a mastery of this quite difficult, but beautiful language.

I learned a lot by listening to these CDs in the car. They are very authentic in sound and easy to follow, especially with the accompanying book.

This is strictly regarding the tapes "Mastering Finnish." While amazon includes reviews of the text book, the tapes do not come with a book. I haven't been able to find the textbook on amazon. Alone the tapes are of no help to one new to Finnish. The tape I listened to included dialogues in Finnish with introductions in English. There was no introduction of simple words, no repetition of frases. Perhaps this would be a helpful tape for someone more advanced. For me, listening to Finnish radio online would be as good.