Duolingo had extremely good grammar lectures for many languages, hidden under a “hints” button underneath each learning node. And then Duolingo went and deleted all of that information, making the “hints” button essentially useless and nullifying hundreds of hours of work volunteers had put into writing the grammar lectures there! Finnish is one of the languages where the volunteer crew had made a seriously big effort writing good quality grammar lectures in the “hints” sections. And then one day: *poof*!

A solution I have found useful with various languages has been figuring out what are the reasons some stuff is done in a very unusual manner. There’s basically always something such a rule allows you to take shortcuts at in some whole other language situation. When you notice that the very weird structure is not used in some situation, you get much more precision in understanding what that means. All languages have things that are ambiguous because the grammar leaves things unsaid. “We are ugly” doesn’t really tell whether you, trolske, are ugly or if it’s only me and a couple other people who are. But there languages where you have a different word for “we” depending on whether it also includes the people being talked to, or not. (Finnish is not one of those languages, though :( )
That’s a rule that is a bit annoying to learn because instead of “I, you, she, we, youse, they” you need to learn “I, you she, we, wo, youse, they”. One extra word. But damn it’s satisfying when you hear “we are ugly” said in that language and know precisely that you are not included! Or “Wo are ugly”, meaning that yes, “wo are indeed ugly, including you.”

When you find out why the complexity exists, your brain stops rebelling against the rule and you will learn what needs to be learned!

What are the most frustrating things about Finnish? I might be able to help you a bit, maybe? :)

In German there are some rules to this:

• All non-living things that end with -e are always feminine. Coffee ends in and -e in German, but is a plant, and therefore living, so that’s why the rule doesn’t apply. But otherwise it applies fully. (Except that “the end” is “das Ende”, and building is “das Gebäude”. But still, the exceptions number in one or two. Otherwise all non living words ending with -e are feminine. “Die Straße” for a street. “Die Dose” for a can.
• Everything with -chen is always neutral. This rule is so stupidly strong that even the word for “girl”, “mädchen” is not feminine. Girls are not female in German because they end with -chen, think about that!

There are other rules as well, but these two are the easiest ones.
Plus there’s the “don’t learn just ‘das Mädchen’. Learn ‘kleines Mädchen’” that I mentioned in another comment above!

The recommended way for remembering words’ genders is to always attach an adjective in front of a word when learning it.

Do not try to learn “die Nacht”.
Learn “stille Nacht”, which means “a quiet night”.
The -e in the word “stille” is there because the word is feminine. When you learn “stille Nacht”, you can automatically recognize it must be “die Nacht”.
Similarly: “Blödes Auto” means “Stupid car”. the ending -es means it’s das Auto.
And “Blöder Mann” means “stupid man”. -er, because it’s der Mann.

Same works in other languages as well. Buen viño = Good wine. Therefore: El viño. Persona rapida = A fast person. -a means it’s la persona.

Because a native speaker of German often hears adjectives in combination with words when they learn them, they automatically constantly receive the necessary information on the words’ genders.

There’s other stuff hinting about what to expect in the end of the sentence: Because there is the question word “Could?”, you know you need to wait until the needed verb arrives. You will of course already encounter a verb at “tell”, but it’s clear that something more is still to come.

In Dutch and German (but not in Scandinavian languages!) it works in a much less clear way: “I have a book” is a complete sentence. There’s nothing making it clear that there must be still more words coming. In your English phrase the sentence feels incomplete if you leave out the last word. But in Dutch they say “I have a book needed” when they want to say “I need a book”. A foreigner hears “I have a book” and then gets surprised by the “needed” still coming up. In English you get a clear warning that something is missing. In Dutch you don’t. You kind of don’t, that is.

Because actually you do: In spoken Dutch you will eventually learn to recognize the intonation pattern that tells whether the sentence is at its end or not. There is a certain melody and stress pattern that you can hear going on, and at the point of “I have a book” the sound of the phrase sounds such that your brain expects more to be coming up. And in written text your brain sees that the sentence still continues. So, in the end this is a beginner level problem. A person living in the Netherlands will quickly learn to subconsciously recognize the intonation and stress patterns. At least that’s what happened to me when I moved to Germany where they have the same “problem”.

Woaw, this sounds awesome! Ik moet mijn nederlands verbetern!

This is how it works in German as well. 16 o’clock is called “um 4” in a typical conversational situation.

It has something like 100 times as many users as PieFed+Lemmy+Mbin do together.

When starting here, I found it a nice way for finding interesting communities to go to different instances’ pages with my web browser and browsing their Local. A lot of communities I would never have thought of!

So, go to sopuli.xyz and see what their Local has to offer, then go to piefed.social for the same. And suppo.fi and Solarpunk (is it slrpnk.net or what?) and what is there still? Blåhaj at least. You can see what instances interesting commentators are coming from and check out the rest of that instance’s atmosphere by just writing that instance’s address in your browser’s URL bar.

The oldest one I regularly use is this one: https://web.archive.org/web/19961108115333/http://www.kela.fi/

It’s the Finnish state organ for giving people their welfare benefits and operating the national health insurance system. So, if you get a child, you get an amount of money per month from Kela for having a child. (Because they want the population to grow).
Or, if you end up unemployed for a longer time, it’s Kela that will pay your unemployment benefits.
Of if you break your leg, it’s Kela that pays for your hospital care. I don’t know how many forms I’ve already filled on their website :D

But yeah, the site’s been around for a while now.

There is an it. And then there’s another it. And some more its, perhaps.
I don’t know what the life of their own is, though. I am also not sure if I do want to know.

But rest assured: It was surely not a mistake.
The its are coming. I, four one, welcome our it overlords!

I usually like being notified of messages in certain chats. But even with that I’d like to be able to choose which chats are allowed to disturb me no matter what and which ones should make noise but not that damn much!

Like what gets done?
Depends on whether the police like what needs to get done or not. If they like it, it gets done.

A relatively recent small anecdote:
They forbade using spikes in your winter tyres on one throughfare street in the centre of Helsinki. The police said that so many people will be breaking that rule that they cannot fine all of them, so they will refuse to go enforce the restriction. And after they had gone public with that, the signs were removed as meaningless.

I’ve had two cases where a car has hit me. In the other case I was in my thoughts and accidentally stood in a wrong place waiting for the light to turn green. I was technically on the roadway – it just wasn’t very clear that that’s a road. A van intentionally crashed into me with a relatively slow speed and I called the emergency number. He fled the scene, but had to later come to an interrogation because I had seen the number plate. The police then said that I have a possibility to withdraw my demands, and if I don’t they will also fine me for having gone against the red lights. They don’t have enough resources and didn’t want to bother with this case, so they made sure it’ll get closed. I was young and very badly out of money, so I let the thing be and allowed them to close the case.

Here’s a photo from the spot. The place where I was standing is marked with a blue cross, the car came from the direction shown by the red arrow:

Then there was another case, where a car saw me about to cross a street and put the pedal to the metal in order to get past the crossing before I get there, speeding through an intersection at a ridiculous speed. As the car sped very close to me, I decided to hit its back window with an open hand to tell that “that was not okay”. The driver stopped his car in middle of the street, stepped out and shouted “Who are you to touch MY car?!” and then tried to grab my throat, leaving some bruises that I then got documented by a doctor (or nurse, or whatever he was technically). The man had said that I had ran across the street crossing, endangering the traffic, and the police told me we can close the case or they can open a case against me as well. I allowed them to close the case.

Here’s the spot where that happened; the car was coming from the direction of the crane, towards the direction where this picture is made from, and I was crossing the nearest crossing in the picture from right to left:

The police is so extremely under-resourced in Finland that I can absolutely understand they are kind of desperate. If they want to have time to investigate murders and other really serious crime, they have to leave something else undone. Or otherwise murderers can just run free. And because they need to choose things to ignore to save their resources, they tend to ignore things that are done by people that they assume don’t agree with their political views.

Those things with the two traffic incidents would have folded out differently if I hadn’t been an under 30-year-old guy with a long hair and if the the drivers hadn’t been middle-aged men in both cases. The police felt like those people were their peers and symphatised with them, so they wanted me to shut up. They also really sympathise with people who drive cars and typically dislike bicyclers. Of course, in the end, that depends on the individual. Each policeman has their own values and chooses what to ignore based on what they find important.

Here’s how Finland fares regarding policemen per 100 000 inhabitants:

and here’s the same for Germany:

…oh, apparently Germany has cut its police force a LOT. Last time I checked, their number was far over 400.

…and then came Valmet with its Dm6.

And nobody paid anything for the intellectual property. The history of these railbuses is fascinating in how it’s a chain of betrayals.

Well, yeah. Up to a point, we do.

But they tend to be based on people knowing that When I say “count the ticket, it’s hundreding” in the meaning “lower the flag, it’s raining” (based on the Finnish word “laskea” meaning both “count” and “to lower”, “lippu” meaning both “ticket” and “flag” and “sataa” being both the partitive form of “hundred” and “it rains”, the joke is about the Finnish language having funny homonyms.

And similarly here the arse of the joke is English being funny in having to meanings for the word “come”? It’s not usual to make such jokes with words that are actual cognates. They are more usually made with word pairs such as read and read, or read and red. I mean, jokes are goof things to have, but they shouldn’t be based on the laughee being ignorant.

What would be a fantastic name for a brothel, however, is this:

Those trains were blatantly copied by another Swedish company, and then that one was again blatantly copied by a Finnish company, leading to the models Dm6 and Dm7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR_Class_Dm7

Zero royalties paid!

The US instituted a mandatory draft to fight that war.

But that was an offensive war, and most countries don’t do those.

Finland was much much safer before.

Depends on how you define “to be safe”. The Russia had declared that its goal is to return the borders of the Russian empire. That sounded a bit scary, but we shrugged it off, because it would require a war and that would hurt the Russia so much that such a war would be idiocy and therefore will not happen.

In case you don’t know where the borders of the Russian Empire were, they included for example these:

• Finland
• Estonia
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• half of Poland
• Ukraine
• Moldova

The Russia has declared that it wants to make all of those countries part of the Russian Federation.

So, we were not in danger, because the Russia would not be stupid enough to begin a war in Ukraine or in Finland, as it was clear that it would hurt the Russia’s economy more than it could ever be of use to it. The Finnish defence doctrine was based on the concept of credible defence. We were told in school that “they can attack us and they could most likely even take over all of Finland, but our army is able to incur such big losses to them that they will not want to do that.”
But then, it turned out that the Russia does not care about losses.

So, we found out two things:

• the Russia is really interested in acting to its declarations. They are not just empty words as we had assumed
• the Russia does not care about losses – therefore the doctrine of credible defence does not protect from the Russia

You can say that we were not in danger because we didn’t know that we are in danger. And in some way that’s true. But, once we found out that we are in danger, then, well, we were.
Since the doctrine of credible defence went down the drain, meaning that Finland effectively did not have a defence that is able to protect it, what else than joining NATO do you suggest we should have done to gain a level of defence capability able to keep the Russia out of Finland? Name one other option that we had.

Your idea that the Russia has a right to defend itself by preemptively taking over Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, half of Poland, Ukraine, and Moldova is, well… It would be impolite saying what it makes you look like.

EDIT: And of course this is relevant: In January 2022 the support for joining NATO was around 35 %. No “let’s join NATO” propaganda had been made at all, but in May 2022 the support for joining NATO was around 80 %. The only thing that caused this was that people around Finland saw that what we had been taught about the Russia in our schools was crap. It was part of the school curriculum to make sure every Finn knows that the Russia is not going to attack us, with an explanation of why not. And it seemed to make sense. And everyone had that in their heads. And then… We saw what the Russia is doing in Ukraine, and it was clear from that alone that shit, we are fucked! That meant, 80 % of the people decided they wanted a new kind of safety against the Russia.
Maybe you can say that they told that in our schools for about 40 years just so that in 2025 Finland could join NATO. But… Well, you know.
In May 2022 you could go to any bar to talk with random people and it would be clear that the assumption was “we are joining NATO. There is no other option.” There was no real dialogue about it, because basically everybody was of the same opinion. For the abovementioned reasons.

I don’t think we could implement your suggestion. Our wartime maximum strength is about 700 000 soldiers and our population is around 5 600 000. That means, in wartime, one out of 8 inhabitants will be in different forms of military service. There’s no way we could pay an adequate salary for that many soldiers. And, that number is still a third less than how many soldiers Ukraine has, and Ukraine is just barely able to keep the Russia from advancing.

I’m not sure why you’re taking Vietnam war as an example, as it’s an offensive war and for example Finland has no plans to do anything like that.

Our military – numbers are public.

Yes, but the speed at which one can recruit soldiers in an emergency is not public.

maintaining offensive and diminishment operations

This is irrelevant, because most countries do not have any offensive operations to maintain in the first place.

You may not know what the phrase “proxy war” means, because in this context it’s rather insulting. And I do not think you meant to insult me or others. But do tell, why and how would Finland wage an offensive war?

Yeah, this is getting a bit off topic, but you’re making wild claims that would really need some clarification.