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Lesson Transcript

Hei, minun nimeni on Paula. Hi everybody! I’m Paula.
Welcome to FinnishPod101.com’s “Suomea kolmessa minuutissa”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Finnish.
Last time we learned how to talk about euros and cents. Can you still remember?
Now we’ll practice how to talk about your plans and ask others about theirs.- for example, if a friend asks you "What are you doing this weekend?"
Let’s start!
If you want to know what your friend is planning to do during the weekend, you can ask:
Mitä sinä aiot tehdä viikonloppuna?
[slowly] Mitä sinä aiot tehdä viikonloppuna?
Let’s break it down.
Mitä is the question word "what".
sinä means “you”
aiot is the conjugated form of aikoa, “going to”
tehdä is “to do”
And viikonloppuna is "in the weekend"
It’s an easy and commonly used sentence, and would be translated as “What are you going to do this weekend?”
What if you’re not asking about this weekend?
When you want to ask about another specific time, you just need to replace the word viikonloppuna.
Tomorrow is huomenna. So you can also say Mitä sinä aiot tehdä huomenna? “What are you going to do tomorrow?” Or, you could also put in a weekday, like maanantaina, "on Monday" or lauantaina, which is "on Saturday".
Did you notice something about all of these words? They all have the ending -na, which is equivalent to the English word “on” in phrases like “ON Monday” and “ON the weekend”. Note that these different endings of words in Finnish are known as cases.
For example, the word for Monday is simply maanantai, but in the sentence “What are you going to do on Monday?”, it becomes maanantaina. Here the word takes on a different case.
So our full question is:
Mitä sinä aiot tehdä maanantaina? What are you going to do on Monday?
Not all words take the ending -na, however. There are a few irregularities: for example with the word loma, “vacation”, which needs the ending -lla.
Mitä sinä aiot tehdä lomalla?
Ok, now you know how to ask the question. But how should you answer, when someone asks you?
Well, for example like this- Minä aion mennä elokuviin. "I'm going to go to the movies."
Minä aion means "I'm going to", mennä elokuviin means “to go to the movies”. Elokuva is the basic form of “a movie”, and elokuviin is the form you would use to indicate “to the movies”
Now it’s time for Paula’s Points.
You have probably noticed that Finnish doesn’t have prepositions in the same way as English. Instead, the grammatical cases, or sijapäätteet, are added to the end of the word depending on how it is used in a sentence. They might be a bit tough to memorize at first, but with a little practice you’ll get the hang of it. We will be mentioning cases throughout the lessons, so please keep them in mind!
In this lesson we learned how to talk about your schedule. Next time we are going to learn how to use the verb olla "to be". We'll also practice talking about nationalities.
I'll be waiting for you in the next Suomea kolmessa minuutissa lesson.
Nähdään pian!

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