Product Description

Specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Finnish. No prior knowledge of the language is required.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #531473 in Books
• Published on: 1997-12-18
• Original language: Finnish, English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From the Back Cover

Colloquial Finnish is easy to use and completely up to date!

Specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, the course offers you a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Finnish. No prior knowledge of the language is required.

What makes Colloquial Finnish your best choice in personal language learning?

• Interactive – lots of exercises for regular practice
• Clear – concise grammar notes
• Practical – useful vocabulary and pronunciation guide
• Complete - including answer key and reference section

By the end of this rewarding course you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in Finnish in a broad range of everyday situations.

Two 60-minute CDs are available to complement the book. Recorded by native speakers, this material will help develop your listening and pronunciation skills.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant second stage but not for absolute beginners.
I think that this course is excellent but really not for the absolute beginner. It teaches from the outset the colloquial spoken version of the language which can be quite different at times from the standard form. Call me old-fashioned but I tend to think that you have to know a language fairly well before you have the confidence to deliberately break the rules. I also think you need to know the language well to pull this off as a foreigner without sounding odd to a native speaker. Using slangy forms when you are struggling with the basics, I think can result in a strange hybrid. Finns often use the standard forms when addressing a foreigner learning the language anyway. Also the dialogues on the tapes, which are of an excellent quality, are authentic but delivered far too quickly to be of any use to a complete beginner. The dialogues themselves often suggest situations that a student studying in Finland or someone working there might use rather than a casual visitor. I also find D. Abondolo's approach to teaching verb types very interesting but extremely confusing. In the long run I find it easier to work from the infinitive than figure out his system. Others may disagree, I suppose it depends what you're used to. Having said all this, I cannot recommend this course too much to anyone who has already got a grounding in the language and who is going to Finland. In fact without it much of the Finnish you'll hear on the street, in TV dramas and even in magazines (especially on the letters page!) will be hard to follow. You may also like to take a look at "Kato Hei" by Maarit Berg and Leena Silfverberg (ISNB 951-792-028-8) Published by Finn Lectura. It's the same idea but is more advanced.

Not for beginners
A nicely produced book but most decidedly not for beginners. The grammar moves along at far too rapid a pace for most of us to absorb and the explanations are confusing. For all its notoriety the old Teach Yourself Finnish, if used judiciously, is still useful, and provides the bonus of a continuous narrative. The word lists may initially look formidable, but the book is nicely paced in terms of grammar, allowing one plently of time to learn, for instance, the present tense before introducing the past, unlike Abondolo, who introduces past tense forms early on with, certainly for the novice, confusing morphological explanations.

Excellent, but mistitled
I started with the simpler and more light-hearted book by Terttu Leney, but wanted another perspective on the bits I find hard. This book helped me to understand the partitive/genitive rules MUCH better, but it has very little sense of humour, and is too confusing and methodical to grab the interest of a complete beginner.