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Complete Finnish Beginner to Intermediate Course: Learn to read, write, speak and understand a new language
It's easy to teach yourself Finnish!
"Complete Finnish: A Teach Yourself Guide" offers a clear and comprehensive approach to Finnish, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing Finnish with confidence. Within each of the 18 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues. You will learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress An accompanying CD with 120-minutes worth of material
"Complete Finnish: A Teach Yourself Guide" offers a clear and comprehensive approach to Finnish, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing Finnish with confidence. Within each of the 18 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues. You will learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress An accompanying CD with 120-minutes worth of material
448 pages, Hardcover
First published December 31, 2010
82 people are currently reading
196 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 9, 2019
Feels optimised to maximise student attrition.
The one thing that sets Finnish apart from most other modern languages is its elaborate case system, with fifteen(ish) cases; it seems sensible, then, to put that front and centre, introducing, say, one or two cases per chapter and drilling them incessantly, with occasional breaks to deal with the rest of the grammar (which is relatively straightforward).
The approach Complete Finnish takes, however, is to drown students in opaque set phrases to memorise whole (some half a dozen words long, most very context-sensitive†), and then, after the dutiful student has memorised them, to make them try to understand conversations full of words and expressions those vocabulary lists didn't even cover, because, as the introduction tells you, you should ``learn to cope with uncertainty''. It's not until the end of the fourth chapter that it's acknowledged Finnish even has cases, and the first steps towards verb conjugation are only taken in chapter 5.
It's clear this is a deliberate choice, but it makes for an extraordinarily frustrating learning experience. I can see this approach working well for a language that's much more similar to the languages the student already speaks (that is, a Standard Average European language), but Finnish is just too grammar-heavy.
A lot of the blame obviously falls on the CEFR, which every chapter also explicitly keeps calling back to. The CEFR is a lot more about creating a useful labour pool in the context of the EU's free movement of workers than it is about language learning itself, and it's especially useless specifically to my goals for learning any languages. As far as I’m concerned, language fluency proceeds: 1. can see structure/identify word types in parallel texts → 2. can translate written text, possibly with a dictionary → 3. can read text without consciously translating → 4. can produce text. Fully 0% of my interest in any language revolves around being able to talk to people in real life/real time. Asking a stranger for directions isn’t something I’ve ever done in any language, and what I did over the holidays isn’t anyone’s business.
It's hard to blame Leney or Teach Yourself® for this, I suppose—the CEFR is now near-universal outside of ossified institutional courses, and that's a genuine loss.
A thing that is very good about Complete Finnish, though, is the audio resources. The fact that they're online rather than on a CD will probably be a much worse decision a decade from now, but while they last they're really good to have, and I very much appreciate that you can just download them as MP3s, without DRM or really any kind of hassle.
Finnish people like to jerk off to their perfectly phonemic spelling, which Finnish mostly does have, but phonemic isn't phonetic and, either way, there are a lot of sounds and sound contrasts that will be difficult to different people depending on what languages you already speak. For myself, I had issues consistently distinguishing [æ] from [a] and [ɛ] (a common but unacknowledged allophone of /e/)—I can do it in English just fine, but I think I was getting tripped up by the fact that in German, <ä> is /ɛ/ rather than /æ/. Other people may struggle with /y/ versus /u/, or any of the diphthongs, many of which are bullshit. Hearing them spoken a lot really helps.
And, of course, while emphasis may be very regular (on the first syllable except for certain recent loans), word boundaries in compound words are far from obvious a lot of the time (because the non-IE vocabulary is so alien), and the text makes no effort to point them out.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't know any more Finnish now than I did before I started, but Complete Finnish definitely made things a lot harder than they needed to be. I stuck with it because Finnish is genuinely a beautiful language, and I expect the experience will be less frustrating on my second pass through the book, but I remain convinced that the best way to teach Finnish is to take the approach of most Latin‡ courses and centre grammar. That means not relegating it to ``language discovery'' sections at the end of chapters, but also reworking vocabulary lists to make stems and conjugation classes and the cases that go with verbs and things much more obvious.
Kiitos lukemisesta.
--------
† One particularly annoying example from chapter 1: ``Entä sinulle?'' and ``Entä sinulla?'' are both glossed ``And you?'' in the same vocabulary list. What's the difference and when do you use which? You may find out half a dozen chapters down the line, when the allative and adessive cases are finally covered, if you remember to put two and two together.
‡ Latin, of course, only has six cases, but because it also has five declensions, three genders, and more irregularity than Finnish, it ends up being harder to get a handle on.
The one thing that sets Finnish apart from most other modern languages is its elaborate case system, with fifteen(ish) cases; it seems sensible, then, to put that front and centre, introducing, say, one or two cases per chapter and drilling them incessantly, with occasional breaks to deal with the rest of the grammar (which is relatively straightforward).
The approach Complete Finnish takes, however, is to drown students in opaque set phrases to memorise whole (some half a dozen words long, most very context-sensitive†), and then, after the dutiful student has memorised them, to make them try to understand conversations full of words and expressions those vocabulary lists didn't even cover, because, as the introduction tells you, you should ``learn to cope with uncertainty''. It's not until the end of the fourth chapter that it's acknowledged Finnish even has cases, and the first steps towards verb conjugation are only taken in chapter 5.
It's clear this is a deliberate choice, but it makes for an extraordinarily frustrating learning experience. I can see this approach working well for a language that's much more similar to the languages the student already speaks (that is, a Standard Average European language), but Finnish is just too grammar-heavy.
A lot of the blame obviously falls on the CEFR, which every chapter also explicitly keeps calling back to. The CEFR is a lot more about creating a useful labour pool in the context of the EU's free movement of workers than it is about language learning itself, and it's especially useless specifically to my goals for learning any languages. As far as I’m concerned, language fluency proceeds: 1. can see structure/identify word types in parallel texts → 2. can translate written text, possibly with a dictionary → 3. can read text without consciously translating → 4. can produce text. Fully 0% of my interest in any language revolves around being able to talk to people in real life/real time. Asking a stranger for directions isn’t something I’ve ever done in any language, and what I did over the holidays isn’t anyone’s business.
It's hard to blame Leney or Teach Yourself® for this, I suppose—the CEFR is now near-universal outside of ossified institutional courses, and that's a genuine loss.
A thing that is very good about Complete Finnish, though, is the audio resources. The fact that they're online rather than on a CD will probably be a much worse decision a decade from now, but while they last they're really good to have, and I very much appreciate that you can just download them as MP3s, without DRM or really any kind of hassle.
Finnish people like to jerk off to their perfectly phonemic spelling, which Finnish mostly does have, but phonemic isn't phonetic and, either way, there are a lot of sounds and sound contrasts that will be difficult to different people depending on what languages you already speak. For myself, I had issues consistently distinguishing [æ] from [a] and [ɛ] (a common but unacknowledged allophone of /e/)—I can do it in English just fine, but I think I was getting tripped up by the fact that in German, <ä> is /ɛ/ rather than /æ/. Other people may struggle with /y/ versus /u/, or any of the diphthongs, many of which are bullshit. Hearing them spoken a lot really helps.
And, of course, while emphasis may be very regular (on the first syllable except for certain recent loans), word boundaries in compound words are far from obvious a lot of the time (because the non-IE vocabulary is so alien), and the text makes no effort to point them out.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't know any more Finnish now than I did before I started, but Complete Finnish definitely made things a lot harder than they needed to be. I stuck with it because Finnish is genuinely a beautiful language, and I expect the experience will be less frustrating on my second pass through the book, but I remain convinced that the best way to teach Finnish is to take the approach of most Latin‡ courses and centre grammar. That means not relegating it to ``language discovery'' sections at the end of chapters, but also reworking vocabulary lists to make stems and conjugation classes and the cases that go with verbs and things much more obvious.
Kiitos lukemisesta.
--------
† One particularly annoying example from chapter 1: ``Entä sinulle?'' and ``Entä sinulla?'' are both glossed ``And you?'' in the same vocabulary list. What's the difference and when do you use which? You may find out half a dozen chapters down the line, when the allative and adessive cases are finally covered, if you remember to put two and two together.
‡ Latin, of course, only has six cases, but because it also has five declensions, three genders, and more irregularity than Finnish, it ends up being harder to get a handle on.
September 18, 2021
As far as language books go, you are expected to learn for yourself without it being all laid out for you which would have been more difficult if I had not been taking online courses and using apps as well. I still can't speak Finnish, but have a better understanding of the language. Any of these Teach Yourself books now have free audio support as well, so that's a bonus.
July 13, 2025
The approach this book takes to teaching a language goes against everything you will read about language learning. Entire sections of really dense grammar with no practice material are interspersed with word lists you’re supposed to just memorize. The material in this book is fairly outdated, too. It was written in 2003, and it feels like it was written in 2003. Moreover, there are a lot, and I mean a lot (!) of mistakes and typos all throughout the book, so I hope you weren’t going to trust it, because you absolutely shouldn’t.
Do yourself a favor and buy the new edition of Suomen Mestari and Harjoitus Tekee Mestarin. It won’t be written in a British-centric context like this book, but arguably it shouldn’t be anyway.
Do yourself a favor and buy the new edition of Suomen Mestari and Harjoitus Tekee Mestarin. It won’t be written in a British-centric context like this book, but arguably it shouldn’t be anyway.
August 5, 2016
Highly recommend it, very useful
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews