If you like music and translating Finnish song lyrics, then you might like this article.

I will be analyzing the song Tässäkö tää oli by Arttu Wiskari. Listen to it here on YouTube. Thank you, Rambsu, for suggesting it!

1. About the Song Tässäkö tää oli

This song never explicitly says what it’s about, so if your Finnish isn’t good enough to draw conclusions from the text of the song, you might not get the idea. Here’s the spoiler:

The song is about a family that rents a motorhome for a vacation. The dad isn’t used to driving a manual vehicle. It starts raining heavily, the car loses grip on the road and an accident happens. One of the children is bedridden for a month and has a broken wrist. However, they don’t care about this because their dad made them celebrities. Their failed holiday made it to the front page of a tabloid newspaper.

The title of the song translates as “Was that all?”, which expresses the disappointment of the dad regarding their failed holiday to Mikkeli. Car accidents are often lethal, so an additional interpretation could be a reflection on life as a whole: “Tässäkö tää elämä nyt sitten oli?”

2. Spoken Language Used in the Song

This song has many excellent examples of very common spoken language elements, which you will have to learn when studying Finnish. These are the elements that are the most prominent in the song:

2. Song Lyrics – Arttu Wiskari – Tässäkö tää oli

3. Glossary

The following grammar terms have been abbreviated.

I have marked different elements of the analysis using the following symbols.

4. Tässäkö tää oli – Arttu Wiskari – Finnish Song Analyzed

It’s very common in spoken language to use the passive in the first person plural. That’s why we have saatiin in this sentences rather than saimme. It’s the past passive form of saada.

The passive verb form has an influence on the object of the sentence: lomasetti. The object of a passive sentence won’t be inflected in the genitive case like it would in a regular sentence. The standard language sentence “Me saimme lomasetin” will contain the genitive case. In the equivalent spoken language sentence “Me saatiin lomasetti” the object is in the basic form.

Visulahti is an amusement park in Mikkeli. One of the attractions there is the Wax Cabinet, a museum filled with wax figures of famous people.

Adjectives can be inflected in all the cases. The comparative and superlative of said adjectives can also be inflected: the superlative of halpa is halvin, which becomes halvimman in the genitive case.

You will always put the adjective (halvin) in the same form as the noun it is attached to (matkailuauto). We are using the genitive because halvin matkailuauto is the object of the verb vuokrata. The total object of a sentence generally appears in the genitive case: we rent the whole motorhome.

The second part of this section doesn’t have a verb or subject at all. The full sentence would be “Matkailuauto on meille hyvä, mutta toisille mauton“.

There are several elements missing in this sentence. When adding all the missing written language elements, you get “Minun vaimoni täyttää minun vieressäni sanaristikoita“. It’s fairly common in songs to leave out elements that are clear from the context.

The word ristikko on its own could mean lattice or grid. In this context, it’s short for sanaristikko, which is a crossword puzzle. It’s inflected in the plural partitive in the song, so she’s filling them right now.

In this context, vieressä means minun vieressä “next to me”. The wife is sitting next to her husband in the car.

The standard language version of this sentence would be: Yritän opetella käyttämään kytkintä.

In this sentence, käyttää is actually not the basic form of the verb. Rather, it’s the spoken language -maan form. In spoken language, käyttäämään becomes käyttää(n). You might have come across this with other verbs, such as Menen nukkuun (rather than nukkumaan) or Menen tekeen ruokaa (rather than tekemään). In the song, the -maan form (or better: its spoken language alternative) is used because the verb opetella requires the third infinitive‘s mihin form.

The verb opetella means “to learn”. It’s derived from the verb oppia, which also means “to learn”. When we add the -ele- derivation type to the verb oppia, it means that you’re learning something more slowly. It’s taking time, it’s a process. While oppia means you learn something, opetella means that you’re in the process of learning something.

In standard written Finnish, we would say Lapset arvuuttelevat. However, in spoken language, the third person plural is simplified and looks the same as the third person singular: lapsi arvuuttelee, lapset arvuuttelee.

The first person plural is also different in spoken language: we use the passive mennään instead of menemme.

Neutral word order: Rankkasateessa mä en nää mitään eteeni.

The postposition edessä “in front of” appears in the mihin form in this song: eteen. Read more about the inflection of postpositions here. The illative case is used here because of the direction of the singer’s gaze: he’s trying to see to the front. The word edessä in this particular context would only work if the car is standing still because, then, what’s in front of him wouldn’t be moving. The form eteeni contains the possessive suffix -ni, which has partly assimilated into the postposition (ie. eteen + ni > eteeni).

In spoken language, diphtongs often assimilate into long vowels. That’s why näe becomes nää. The verb form en näe is the first person negative present tense form of nähdä “I don’t see”.

REFRAIN

The phrase Tässäkö tää oli is literally “In here this was?” The proper English translation is something like “Is this it?” or “Was that all?”. The singer is expressing his confusion or disappointment that nothing more came of their holiday. As Matti and Jussi-Pekka pointed out in the comments, the context of this song also supports the interpretation of “Is this how it all ends?”.

Neutral word order: Lasten monopoli levii nelostielle. The children’s monopoly game scatters onto the road. Implicitely, this is an indicator that they have gotten into a car accident.

In standard Finnish, the verb levitä gets conjugated in the third person singular as leviää. It’s one of those verbs that look like verbtype 5 (which end in -ita/itä), but is conjugated as a verbtype 4 verb. In spoken language, the diphtong -iä- assimilates into –ii.

Nelostie is the highway that starts in Helsinki and goes all the way up to the North of Finland. It can also be called Valtatie 4.

Neutral word order: Se kylmä alkoholiton olut jää juomatta.

The phrase jäädä juomatta is a hard one to translate. The beer won’t be consumed; it “remains un-drunk”. You can combine to verb jäädä with the -matta form of verbs to express that something stays “undone”. For example, the phrase Huone jäi siivoamatta means “The room remained uncleaned” and the phrase Se jäi huomaamatta can be translated as “It remained unnoticed”.

The strange pause in this section between alkoholi and –ton is mainly due to the fact that this is supposed to rhyme with the previous section’s monopoli. However, as a language learner, it might help you realize that we’re dealing with the suffix -ton, which expresses a lack of something; in this case, a lack of alcohol.

The pronoun se in this section is used very much like a definite pronoun: Se kylmä olut “the cold beer”. This is something that is used sometimes in spoken language. Generally Finnish doesn’t have definite pronouns. It makes up for this with differences in, for example, word order.

Solifer is a Finnish manifacturer of motorhomes. In the song, the motorhome itself is referred to as Soliferi.

This section on its own is hard to interpret, as joita refers to the noun olut of the previous section. The phrase “joita ostin kuus” translates to “of which I bought six”. Compare to the sentence: Ostin niitä kuusi “I bought six of them”.

The rection for ostaa is normally mistä, because you buy things from places: Ostin olutta kaupasta, lääkkeitä apteekista ja tupakkaa kioskilta. In this song, however, the singer bought the beer to put into the fridge, which is why we use the mihin form jääkaappiin. Similarly, we could say Ostin hameen juhliin ie. “I bought a skirt for the party”.

Neutral word order: Glykoli valuu autosta asfaltille.

Nice use of the mistä and mihin forms here: the glycol flows from the car onto the asphalt.

Neutral word order: Nuorisoidoli vaikenee radiossa. Due to the car accident, the radio falls silent.

The verb vaieta is a verbtype 6 verb with consonant gradation: a -k- appears.

“Silence surrounds us” would be Hiljaisuus ympäröi meitä. The word order here has been turned around.

Tämä yllätys has been inflected in the plural partitive in this section, because the children deserve an unspecified plural amount of surprises. The diphtong at the end of yllätyksiä gets assimilated into a long vowel. This is very common in spoken Finnish.

This section contains another example of how the third person plural of verbs rarely gets -vat in colloquial Finnish. Using the same ending as in the third person singular (e.g. ansaitsee instead of ansaitsevat) is very common.

The word pettymyksii is created in the same way as yllätyksii in the previous section.

Finnish doesn’t have a direct translation for “to disappoint”. You have to use two words to convey the same meaning: tuottaa pettymys, which translates to “to cause disappointment”. We could translate Oon tuottanut liikaa pettymyksii as “I have disappointed them too much”. I’ve chosen to add the more literal translation above.

The phrase mennä pieleen is a very common way to express that something doesn’t succeed.

In Finland, people generally eat ham for Christmas. Adding the suffix -ton to kinkku makes it an adjective describing Christmas: a ham-free Christmas is a Christmas where no ham was eaten. The most likely reason why the singer’s family was not having any ham is that they were too poor to buy any. This fits together with the previous mention of jobs failing.

The phrase jäädä mieleen is a common phrase worth remembering.

Tires can end up aquaplaning when there’s excess water on the road. This phenomenon is described in Finnish as nousta vesiliirtoon or joutua vesiliirtoon.

Miettiä is a partitive verb, which is why oma siirto appears in the partitive case.

Siirto is a word used, among other things, for chess moves. It’s not limited to chess: you can think about your “next move” in any situation with a real or imagined opponent. In the song, only one move can be made, because there’s less than a second time to think about it. The song doesn’t say “next” move, but I feel this sentence is easier to understand with that word added.

One hundred is sata in Finnish. The number 100 is satanen. Learn more about the names of the numbers here. The singer was driving at a speed of 100 km/h.

Both ees (edes) and tiiä (tiedä) are examples of words where the -d- sound has been dropped. This is very common in Finnish spoken language. Read more here.

Olisi selvinnyt is the perfect conditional: “would have survived”. Adding the -ko/kö suffix makes the statement a question: Olisiko Vatanen selvinnyt? “Would Vatanen have survived?” The singer thinks the situation on the road was so bad that even an experienced rally driver like Vatanen wouldn’t have been able to manage without problems.

This section is sung from the perspective of one of the children, who got badly injured in the car accident, but doesn’t particularly care about that.

Neutral word order: vaikka mä olen kuukauden vuoteenoma

The word kuukausi in this section expresses the duration of the situation, which is why we use the genitive case. Another possibility would have been the translative case kuukaudeksi.

Vuoteenoma means “bedridden”. It consists of the words vuode (old word for “bed, bedstead”) and oma (own). The child is stuck in bed for a whole month after the car accident.

The phrase “Ei haittaa” or “Ei se haittaa” is a really good one to learn if you’re not familiar with it yet! It’s a great way to express that something doesn’t bother you or doesn’t matter.

Ranne on kipsattuna translates as “the wrist is plastered”. The essive ending -na is used here to express that the plaster is a state that will last for a while. The child broke their wrist in the accident.

The kid saw the cover of Iltalehti, and realized that their dad made them celebrities. Their car accident ended up on the front page of the tabloid newspaper. From the perspective of the kid, all the damage and pain don’t matter that much.

The sentence Isä teki meistä julkkiksii is a great example of a tuloslause (ie. a sentence that expresses the result of something). You can read more about this sentence type here. Section 5 on that page deals with sentences such as the one in this song, where there is someone causing the result.

Julkkis “celebrity” is a spoken language word ending in -is. It’s written in the plural partitive because there is more than one person who was made into a celebrity.

Please let me know in the comments if this is the type of content you want to see more of! You can also leave some song suggestions.

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