Daily Routine: Beginner Finnish Lesson Plan #4
This Beginner Finnish Lesson Plan #4 contains some suggestions on how to approach Finnish when you’re just getting started. It’s not an exhaustive explanation, but rather meant to give you some pointers to get started. We’ll be focusing on daily routine beginner Finnish in this lesson.
This series will not be a step-by-step guide to learning Finnish. Just reading this article won’t magically teach you Finnish: you will need to make an effort, click the links and study the subjects mentioned in this series. All the current topics currently are part of the beginner level A1.
Describing Your Daily Routine
The main topic of this lesson is talking about doing things, especially your routine in the morning. Time to learn to form proper sentences!
1. Finnish Vocabulary for Beginners
As a beginner, it’s useful to start with vocabulary lists. After all, you can’t make sentences if you don’t know any vocabulary!
Please note that the vocabulary pages on my website try to offer something for learners of any proficiency. This means that even the beginner subjects will have some information for intermediate and advanced learners. Use common sense and pick the words you will need rather than blindly learning the whole list.
Useful Vocabulary for Daily Routine Beginner Finnish:
- Your first 100 verbs: in order to express what you’re doing
- Telling the time: in order to say at what time you’re doing these things
- Rooms and Furniture: in order to say where you are doing something
2. Finnish Grammar for Beginners
Below, you can find some grammar topics that will allow you to talk about your daily routine. It’s important to realize that you can’t learn these topics in isolation. You will need to combine them with the vocabulary topics above that you’ve learned.
Please note that grammar topics like the partitive have super many different uses. As a beginner, you should only focus on what is important for you right at the time when you’re studying. In the case of daily routines, all you need is to know that the partitive is used with numbers and in negative sentences. Ignore everything else!
- The Finnish verbtypes: in order to conjugate verbs
- Location cases: in order to say you’re in a place, going to a place or coming from a place (missä mistä mihin).
- Vowel harmony: in order to add the correct ending at the end of words
- The partitive: only in order to be able to say you have two/three/ten or none of something
3. Combining Grammar and Vocabulary
We can combine our new-learned skill of telling what time it is with the basic verbs we’re learning to talk about what we do every day.
- Learn to conjugate the verbs you’ve just learned through your new mastery of the verbtypes in order to say what you’re doing, eg:
- Minä herään. Sinä heräät. “I wake up. You wake up.”
- Minä syön. Me syömme. “I eat. We eat.”
- Through adding the knowledge of telling the time, you can give more specific information about your daily routine, eg:
- Minä nousen kello 7:30. “I get up at 7:30 am.”
- Minä syön aamupalaa kello 7:45. “I eat breakfast at 7:45.”
- The location cases and the names of the rooms and furniture can be used to add even more detail, eg:
- Minä nousen sängystä. “I get up from the bed.”
- Minä kävelen makuuhuoneesta keittiöön. “I walk from the bedroom to the kitchen.”
- Minä syön aamupalaa keittiössä. “I eat breakfast in the kitchen.”
That’s it for this Daily Routine Beginner Finnish Lesson Plan suggestion. I know this is not a complete lesson. It’s not meant to be one. The goal is to show you how grammar and vocabulary should be combined with the purpose of getting a message across, rather than just for the sake of learning individual words or grammar.
