Finnish for busy people

Uusi kielemme

Welcome to Uusi kielemme – Finnish for Busy People! The place to learn Finnish; be it grammar or vocabulary! This website gets updated regularly so do check back for more interesting content! At the end of 2022, I reached 600 published articles!

If you’re on a mobile device, you can access the vocabulary and grammar overview pages via the menu up above on the left side.

Newest articles

Also new: Interactive exercises about lausetyypit (sentence types) such as existential sentences, necessity sentences and verb+verb sentences.


Welcome to my website Uusi kielemme!

Uusi kielemme can be translated as “our new language” (the -mme at the end of kielemme is a possessive suffix meaning “our”). Finnish is not just a language spoken by Finns which you happen to study. While learning Finnish, it slowly becomes our language as well: yours and mine, too. I’m Inge, a non-native learner of Finnish with a master’s degree in Finnish, acquired at the university of Tampere. You can find out more about me in this FAQ article!

This website is my hobby. I started it because I found there was a serious lack of websites that offered clear explanations of Finnish grammar in English. Uusi kielemme has been on the internet since 2007. These days, there are more sources available than there were when I started this project, but I hope you like Uusi kielemme as much as I do.


How to Use Uusi kielemme

Uusi kielemme is not a lesson plan. There is no specific page where you should start from when you’re learning Finnish. While the vocabulary overview page is divided into three parts (beginner, intermediate and advanced), this isn’t that important either. I firmly believe that – with vocabulary – you’re best off studying first what interests you the most.

The grammar overview page contains subjects of all levels of difficulty. In some articles, I’ve mentioned which parts are for more advanced students, which hopefully helps you somewhat. What worries me the most is perhaps that you, the reader, might get overwhelmed by all the information on one page.

The idea is not that you learn everything on one page at the same time. Rather, I see Uusi kielemme as a reference material. When a grammar issue or vocabulary theme starts tickling your interest, you can look it up and learn more about it on the website.

There is always more to come look up! It’s a good idea to come back to subjects you’ve learned the basics of. Usually even the most basic subjects still have something interesting for advanced students.

Happy learning!