Expanding your vocabulary is important, but it’s not always easy to decide what to focus on. It can also be hard to find phrases that you want to learn. It all depends on what you think people around you will want to talk about. One common topic would be to talk about your age.

Especially when you have small children and talk to other parents, age will play a big part in those conversations. In this post you can learn some random phrases with which you can talk about your age, or other people’s age.

The first sections on this page contain vocabulary for beginners, but the further down you scroll, the more advanced the content is. Realize that you don’t need to learn ALL this vocabulary when you’re just starting out learning Finnish!

1. Vocabulary about Age and Aging

Let’s first start with some random words!

2. How to Ask and Tell your Age

Notes:

1. A very common mistake – even for some intermediate students of Finnish – is mixing up -vuotias and vuotta vanha. The word x-vuotias is an adjective, so you use it as you would an adjective. For example, we could say “Hän on 18-vuotias sairaanhoitaja” which means “He’s [an 18 year old] nurse”. We can’t use vuotta vanha “years old” in that same phrase at all.
2. The verb täyttää (in other contexts usually translated as “to fill”) is used in relation to birthdays. In English, you would say you turn a certain age. In Finnish, you “fill” a certain age. Thus, we can ask “Kuinka paljon hän täyttää?” or “Kuinka monta vuotta täytät tänä vuonna?”.

3. Explaining how old your baby is in Finnish

Here’s a small number of phrases you could use to explain the age of your baby in Finnish.

Notes:

1. In sentences like these, the word ikäinen is often used. Notice how the age will appear in the genitive case: viiden and kuukauden are the genitive forms of viisi and kuukausi. You can find out more about the numbers in the genitive case here.

And here are some other phrases related to the age of a baby or child and their development.

4. Using the Essive Case with Age

The essive case is used to express a time period, so it is often used with expressions related to one’s age.

In addition to the examples below, we can also add it to -vuotias and -ikäinen. You will pronounce the number just as it normally is pronounced, so 20-vuotiaana would be kaksikymmentävuotiaana (or kakskytvuotiaana in spoken language).

Notes:

1. Note how -vuotiaana in the table above means “As a xx year old”.
2. If you use a separate sentence, such as in “When I was 20 years old”, you will use -vuotias
3. The same difference is also true for -ikäisenä and -ikäinen.

5. “Round Years” – Decades as Ages

As adults, Finns generally only really celebrate “round years”, i.e. every time you turn a decade older (e.g. 40, 50, 90). You could say “Juhlin tänä vuonna pyöreitä vuosia“, so “I’m celebrating round years this year”. Generally it’s not very polite to ask which decade they are celebrating.

It’s also common to start referring to people’s age as what decade they’re currently in rather than giving the exact age. You do this in English, too, when you say someone is in their 30s or 50s. You use –kymppinen in Finnish for this purpose: kolmekymppinen or viisikymppinen. These are adjectives. As such, they will also inflect in the essive case (-na) just like –ikäinen and –vuotias in the previous section.

You can also use kolmekymppiset in the plural to refer to someone’s 30th birthday party.

6. More random example sentences

7. Finnish Sayings About Age and Aging

• ”Vanhuus ei tule yksin.”
  • Literally: Old age doesn’t come alone.
  • Meaning: Getting old comes with all kinds of health problems.
• ”(Me muistelemme) vanhoja hyviä aikoja.”
  • Literally: (We think back to) the old good times.
  • Meaning: The days long gone, whose negative sides we don’t remember.
• ”Hän on vanha kettu.”
  • Literally: He’s an old fox.
  • Meaning: He’s a veteran, he has experienced all kinds of things.
• ”Totuus kuuluu lasten suusta.”
  • Literally: The truth is heard from children’s mouths.
  • Meaning: Innocent children say things the way they are.

Read more about birthdays here!

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