Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself Finnish: Complete Course (Book & CD)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Both Whitney and Leney have written books in the Teach YourselfSeries called _Teach Yourself Finnish_. ............ The edition other reviewers here have reviewed is the one by Terttu Leney; and that's the one I also recommend. It's more recent, and also geared more towards a beginning audience. Whitney's can be useful, but he introduces grammatical minutae far in advance of their use to the learner and gives an extensive vocabulary for each chapter even when most of it is irrelevant to what is being learned in the chapter. Leney, on the other hand, introduces vocabulary and grammar as it's used, and offers a wealth of information about contemporary Finnish culture for people planning to visit.

This book presents a small amount of elementary Finnish, and it suffers the ills of small courses: not enough explanation of grammar, not enough exercises, not enough reading, not enough sound recording. It is visually attractive--but is that enough?

Finnish is a complex language with exacting pronunciation, complex grammar, and an extensive network of internal sound changes that must be explained clearly and completely. The student cannot assimilate these structures without reinforcement from exercises and readings. None of these elements are sufficiently provided in this book.

Compare this poverty of resources with the very fine course by Meri Lehtinen (books and recordings published by Indiana University) and with the two second-best runners up, the Foreign Service Institute's Finnish course, also with book and recordings, and "Finnish for Foreigners," (books and recordings) published in Finland but widely available in the English-speaking world.

Terttu Leney's "Finnish: a complete course for beginners" is a good resource for the beginning student or for the traveler who is planning a trip to Finland and wants to know a little bit about the Finnish language and Finnish customs before they get there.

Finnish is a difficult language with complicated grammar and special rules of syntax. At times the reader might get a little confused by Leney's presentation of some of these rules. But a patient and persistent reader can either muddle through the grammar or pass it by and instead focus upon learning Finnish expressions.

The book's strength is its organization into logical sections (greetings, travel, phone conversations, eating out, the weather etc.) Both a traveler or a student can use the dialogues and vocabulary to gain insight into everyday phrases and events. Likewise the book is packed full of information about Finnish customs and culture. These explanations are integrated into dialogues and vocabularies suited to both student and traveler.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning the Finnish language in its practical day to day form, or to the sophisticated traveler who likes to learn about the country and its culture and customs before their trip.

Even as a German reader I found this book very helpful and easy to follow. I used this book as extra support during my time in Finland when I was studying Finnish. I think it gives you very useful words, unlike other books I have worked with, and explains the grammar in an easy to understand manner. But beware: Finnish is an extremely difficult language so don't be dicouraged if you are not succeeding as qickly as you would wish to. Just take your time. Finnish is worth it!

I think that this book could possibly start at a little more elementary level. This was the first tool I used to learn Finnish until I took classes at a university with a major in Finnish Studies. It presents a lot of the rules of Finnish grammar and vocabulary, maybe too much in each chapter. Just take your time with studying. I think if you study about one chapter per week with a small review and then proceed, you should do well. Go at a faster pace if you feel you can. Finnish is a wonderful language once you learn how it fits together. A few good things is that you don't need to memorize genders(no masculine, feminine, neuter genders in Finnish) such as many other languages have. Also there are very few irregular verbs. So the rules are pretty straight forward once you understand them and that will take time and practice. I don't think Finnish is necessarily "hard", just different from the logic of English and its related languages. For a beginner, I think "Finnish For Foreigners" is better since lessons are divided into small units each with a new topic instead of many topics grouped into a few chapters. Another text/cassette pack is "Mastering Finnish", by Borje Vahamaki. Finnish for Foreigners is rather expensive and harder to come by. If you can't purchase it, try out Teach Yourself or Mastering Finnish. Audio cassettes are also a great help in memorization and correct pronunciation. You can get these courses I mentioned with cassettes if you want to. Best wishes with your language study.

The book has excellent dialog and explanations of grammatical constuctions. My only complaint is that the arrangement and layout of vocabulary at the end of each chapter is totally chaotic and user-unfriendly. For example, the vocab order at the end of the chapter doesn't correspond to the order of appearance in the text, or (more likely) it only loosely corresponds, so that you have to look through 40 vocab words to find the one you are looking for, if it's there at all.

Before moving to Finland for graduate school, I purchased Terttu Leney's TEACH YOURSELF FINNISH. Leney's is the most widely available Finnish textbook in the English-speaking world, and it did equip me with enough basic Finnish to comfortably settle into life in Finland. However, the book is not perfect, and in spite of its strengths it pales in many respects to other, more obscure textbooks.

Leney's book generally follows the contemporary Teach Yourself format: dialogues are followed by vocabulary (first phrase-for-phrase glosses, then individual new words), then come exercises, and finally at the end of each lesson is a dialogue spoken more quickly in more authentic language that the student is challenged to at least get the gist of. Each lesson is dedicated to a specific subject, such as shopping, going to the doctor, or (towards the end) talking about history and politics. There are Finnish-English and English-Finnish vocabularies and, something which all other TY volumes should emulate, some advice on where to go next (books, websites, radio, etc.).

While things like asking directions is a typical topic in beginner's textbook, I rather disagree with Leney's giving it so much attention. The lost tourist asking directions in limited Finnish is likely just going to be answered in English, Finnish people being so at ease with talking to foreigns in it. Rather, the challenge for people new to Finland is feeling at ease with a group of native speakers, such as classmates or coworkers, and so starting off with asking directions isn't so efficient, nor is the early emphasis on talking to bank tellers.

The CDs are absolutely essential. With a sound system so different from English, Finnish is not a language that can be learnt well just off the page. Even if you have a couple of Finnish friends, chances are they couldn't enunciate like the folks on the CDs. Teach Yourself CDs vary widely in quality, but these are very good, with a large cast of voice actors so you just used to different voices, and a good mix of clear and "street" enunciation.

What's wrong with Leney's course? Well, as a one-volume course its exercises are woefully insufficient. Agglutinating languages need much more drill than, say, Spanish or Italian, but the exercises here are few and train the student more to utter stock phrases than to internalize the huge amount of endings that conversational Finnish requires. It would have been better if Teach Yourself had commissioned a course from Leney in two volumes, a beginner's and an intermediate, which would have provided space for much more drill. Teach Yourself has done this for some languages, but regrettably not "smaller" ones.

If you want to learn Finnish, by all means acquire TEACH YOURSELF FINNISH. However, at the same time you need to get a few other books. In my Finnish for foreigners courses at University of Helsinki, the assigned textbooks were Leena Silfverberg's SUOMEN KIELEN ALKEISOPPIKIRJA and SUOMEN KIELEN JATKO-OPPIKIRJA (both published by Finn Lectura). While it might be a bit of work ordering those, and much in them is designed for classroom use, they abound in just the type of rigorous exercises that Leney's course lacks. Leela White's From Start to Finnish (Finn Lectura, 2003) is also a useful textbook, and is available though this very site.

This is not a bad course. However, like breakfast cereal that advertisements claim to be part of a balanced breakfast showing it in photos alongside bread and fruit, Terttu Leney's TEACH YOURSELF FINNISH is but one element towards profiency in Finnish.

Before moving to Finland for graduate school, I purchased Terttu Leney's TEACH YOURSELF FINNISH. Leney's is the most widely available Finnish textbook in the English-speaking world, and it did equip me with enough basic Finnish to comfortably settle into life in Finland. However, the book is not perfect, and in spite of its strengths it pales in many respects to other, more obscure textbooks.

Leney's book generally follows the contemporary Teach Yourself format: dialogues are followed by vocabulary (first phrase-for-phrase glosses, then individual new words), then come exercises, and finally at the end of each lesson is a dialogue spoken more quickly in more authentic language that the student is challenged to at least get the gist of. Each lesson is dedicated to a specific subject, such as shopping, going to the doctor, or (towards the end) talking about history and politics. There are Finnish-English and English-Finnish vocabularies and, something which all other TY volumes should emulate, some advice on where to go next (books, websites, radio, etc.).

While things like asking directions is a typical topic in beginner's textbook, I rather disagree with Leney's giving it so much attention. The lost tourist asking directions in limited Finnish is likely just going to be answered in English, Finnish people being so at ease with talking to foreigns in it. Rather, the challenge for people new to Finland is feeling at ease with a group of native speakers, such as classmates or coworkers, and so starting off with asking directions isn't so efficient, nor is the early emphasis on talking to bank tellers.

The CDs are absolutely essential. With a sound system so different from English, Finnish is not a language that can be learnt well just off the page. Even if you have a couple of Finnish friends, chances are they couldn't enunciate like the folks on the CDs. Teach Yourself CDs vary widely in quality, but these are very good, with a large cast of voice actors so you just used to different voices, and a good mix of clear and "street" enunciation.

What's wrong with Leney's course? Well, as a one-volume course its exercises are woefully insufficient. Agglutinating languages need much more drill than, say, Spanish or Italian, but the exercises here are few and train the student more to utter stock phrases than to internalize the huge amount of endings that conversational Finnish requires. It would have been better if Teach Yourself had commissioned a course from Leney in two volumes, a beginner's and an intermediate, which would have provided space for much more drill. Teach Yourself has done this for some languages, but regrettably not "smaller" ones.

If you want to learn Finnish, by all means acquire TEACH YOURSELF FINNISH. However, at the same time you need to get a few other books. In my Finnish for foreigners courses at University of Helsinki, the assigned textbooks were Leena Silfverberg's SUOMEN KIELEN ALKEISOPPIKIRJA and SUOMEN KIELEN JATKO-OPPIKIRJA (both published by Finn Lectura). While it might be a bit of work ordering those, and much in them is designed for classroom use, they abound in just the type of rigorous exercises that Leney's course lacks. Leela White's From Start to Finnish (Finn Lectura, 2003) is also a useful textbook, and is available though this very site.

This is not a bad course. However, like breakfast cereal that advertisements claim to be part of a balanced breakfast showing it in photos alongside bread and fruit, Terttu Leney's TEACH YOURSELF FINNISH is but one element towards profiency in Finnish.

Not an awful book, but it really shortchanges you on exercises and drills. One example is often deemed enough to explain a pattern and in Finnish that's really not true. For example: an early dialogue in the banking chapter gives you a canned phrase for `What is the exchange rate of the pound?' but they don't explain the construct and they don't illustrate how you would ask about the exchange rate of the dollar, franc, ruble, etc. You're left to guess about it, and you'll probably make a mistake somewhere when you guess because Finnish words have lots of little quirks when you put endings on them. It's a shame to get one canned phrase instead of a useful, reusable pattern, but that's how this book works.

Chapters are by topic, like banking, asking directions, travelling, having a sauna, and so on. This also leads to a neglect of pattern and structure, and you get quite a load of unexplained grammatical features from very early on in the book; the dialogues just don't do enough to illustrate the structures.

The exercises are very limited, often of the form `What does x mean' or 'Which of the following means x.' There are also little games like word finds which are of dubious usefulness.

There is a glossary at the back, but it is Finnish-English only.

On the plus side: you get a lot of dialogues; the speakers on the audio tapes are clear and free of annoying mannerisms. You will get lots of practice with basic niceties of conversation and the grammar explanations are easy to understand (just not illustrated enough.)

If you can find / afford it, go with FSI's Conversational Finnish instead; it's better organized and moves at a much more sensible pace. The FSI graded reader is nice for intermediate syntax and vocabulary, too.

This is a useful book which covers a reasonable amount of ground without being overambitious. The main drawback is that the chapters are quite long and lacking in clear focus. There are a few other, minor irritations: the example dialog in Chaper 1 is also *way* too advanced and in fact includes a grammatical feature which is never explained anywhere in the book ! This is very offputting to the beginner. The glossaries for the various dialogs are also inconsistent - some words are defined multiple times throughout the book, some not at all. Overall this is so-so for self-study, but would perform well in a teacher-led environment.