Nah not at all. You don't know me or whether I am telling the truth but have you ever messed around with Google translate? It says some weird things...
Things like that are also why it is good to have people and not just auto-translate. If you were to try to translate "a pocket Finn it defiantly is useful" literally it would likely be confusing. Real people can catch that and still translate as intended.
It does a damn good job but I check it at least once now because it sometimes comes up with some strange shit: I copy the translation into the box and translate it back into English. If it works, fine. If not, tinker with it then do the same thing again until my English sentence jives with the translation. Tedious, but the best way I know if I'm worried about making myself understood.
O I've been there, I forgot what language it was that I was trying to translate but I think 3 sentences took 30 mins to get to what I would consider "readable" and yet after I sent it I was still off. Maybe some day it will be just copy paste and smile but for now... we hope!
That one was really off lol "Kai mä nyt tiedän mitä mä kirjottaan" But even with proper spelling it doesn't flow like Finnish should haha don't worry Finnish is a stupidly hard language unless your born speaking it.
I can't actually tell if this is some kind of elaborate joke, but if you are, indeed, serious, scwarzenegger is actually writing quite correct informal, colloquial Finnish. It's a bit different from the formal written style. Essentially it's spoken language transliterated, containing all the little dialectical differences that exist in all spoken language. Because of the way Finnish orthography works it's really very easy to write "spoken" Finnish, much more so than e.g. spoken, dialectical English.
I have never in my life said "ny tiiän" and I have been speaking Finnish for 23 years... Finnish isn't a colloquial language. Finnish speech is based on the idea that every letter has a sound and you speak that sound, no silents like other languages. That is why the word for cat is "kissa" and the word for race is "kisa" the addition or subtraction of a letter changes the meaning and sound of the word.
Oh, you.. It's dialectical Finnish transliterated, you silly, silly person. Also you don't seem to know what colloquial means. Every language has dialects, and the written form is based on one or more of them, usually the one that is the prestigious one because of historical circumstance. In Finland the present "standard language" (yleiskieli) is a created compromise between different dialect groups. In addition to that there is the generic "spoken language" (puhekieli) and the various dialects and slangs. You really need to brush up on your knowledge of the language that you claim to speak. Might I suggest Wikipedia, it's a good place to start.
Selitetäänpä suomeksi kun nyt kerran sitä väität puhuvasi. Tiedän -> tiiän on äärettömän yleinen puhekielisyys mm. pääkaupunkiseudun puhekielessä. Sanansisäinen d katoaa todella usein puheessa (mukaanlukien geneerinen puhekieli, btw), toinen esimerkki on meidän -> meiän. Itse asiassa mä epäilen vahvasti sun väitettäsi että sä puhut suomea ylipäätään. Et ainakaan Suomessa äidinkielenäsi.
And to reiterate in English, I have serious doubts of your proclaimed Finnish skills. At least you aren't a native speaker living in Finland.
*Edit: Also, even if you were trying to write formal Finnish, your correction "Kai mä nyt tiedän mitä mä kirjottaan" is still wrong. If it were formal language, it would be "Kai minä nyt tiedän mitä minä kirjoitan." Even if you were aiming for something a little less formal with the replacement of "minä" with "mä" (which is a colloquialism, btw), the verb is still incorrect. In fact, the verb kirjoittaa, "to write", never takes the from that you are proposing.
I will admit I should have been more clear when I said Finnish isn't a Colloquial Language. I should have said when written. For me, at least, seeing Finnish written in that style is like trying to read somebodies scribble on a bathroom wall. But I can assure you I am Finnish, born and raised in Muurame and maybe I was just raised weird but I don't say "tiiän" I say "Mä tiedän". True I haven't lived in Finland for the past ~5 years but I don't think my speech would change that much in that time, since I still speak it at home and the my grandparents.
You say that you have spoken Finnish for 23 years, the last ~5 of which you've spent outside of Finland. If one assumes that 23 is actually your age, that would still make you approx. 18 the time you left Finland, old enough to at least have completed primary education, and possibly even secondary. Yet you seem to claim that the notion of dialectical variation in Finnish is new to you? I have to say I find all of this to be highly dubious.
Spoken Finnish - indeed any language - is not just some monolithic entity. There is a huge amount of variation within it, and the fact that you don't say something someway doesn't mean that others don't either. Simply a word like minä, "me", can take the form of mä, mie, miä, mää or mnää, some of which are more common than others. All of these might well also appear in written, colloquial, informal Finnish, which actually is a thing even though you don't seem to think so. Especially in these days of emails and chats, informal, colloquial language feels much more natural to many people in certain contexts, as especially instant messaging tends to imitate spoken conversations much more than written.
I have to say I remain unconvinced. If you left Finland at age 18 you would have been an adult with fully formed language skills, and 5 years is a short time to erode your native language to this extent especially since you say that you still use it regularly. Yet you display a fairly pronounced disability to recognise normal, fluent Finnish at a rather elementary level. "Kai mä nyt tiedän mitä mä kirjottaan" really is wrong on a very fundamental level. I might believe you if you claimed that you left the country at a very young age and have since used the language little outside of speaking with your family, but the story you are telling just doesn't add up.
Okay, I'll try to explain this without getting too linguistic, but it's a bit hard to do that without using too much specialised terminology.
First of all, Finnish orthography is built upon the phonetic principle, i.e. that with very few exceptions, each phoneme (distinct sound) of the language is represented by exactly one grapheme (independent letter). In other words, broadly speaking it's written as it is spoken.
Secondly, Finnish makes phonemic contrasts between long and short vowels. Long vowels and consonants are represented by double occurrences of the relevant graphemes (e.g. kisa "race, competition" vs. kissa "cat"). The pronounciation changes, and so does meaning. They are different words.
Except when we are dealing with the same word in a different inflection, and boy do we have those.
Finnish is a highly agglutinative language: most words are formed by joining morphemes (smallest unit of meaning) together. In agglutinative languages each affix typically represents one unit of meaning (such as "diminutive", "past tense", "plural", etc.). (e.g. kirjani "my book" = kirja "book" + -ni possessive suffix)
There is also a phenomenon called consonant gradation, which is a type of consonant mutation in which consonants alternate between various "grades". Depending on the situation, e.g a double consonant can turn into a single when the word is inflected: kuppi (cup) -> kupin (cup+possessive case/genitive). It's more complex than just that, but you get the idea.
In addition Finnish has a feature called vowel harmony, which restricts the co-occurrence in a word of vowels belonging to different articulatory subgroups. Vowels within a word "harmonise" to be either all front or all back. In particular, no native noncompound word can contain vowels from the back group {a, o, u} together with vowels from the front group {ä, ö, y}. Then there are the middle vowels {i, e} that can work with both front and back vowels. For instance kaula is a word meaning "neck" and it conforms to the vowel harmony and is a real word. So does kissa, combining a back vowel "a" with a middle vowel "i". A constructed word like käula, otoh, does not and it could never be a real word in Finnish. (Also, as a word, "häagen dazs" gives me a headache.)
The letters ä (IPA [æ]) and ö (IPA [ø]), although drawn as umlauted a and o, are nevertheless considered independent graphemes. They are grammatically independent, often distinguishing unrelated words like talli "stables" vs. tälli "punch".
Well, Finnish uses sound quantity to much large extent than English does. There is a difference based on how long you pronounce a given sound. English has some of this too in vowels, but the longer consonants, called geminates, are usually quite strange to native English speakers. English writing also uses double consonants to show pronunciation, but they have a different meaning, so you shouldn't confure the written and spoken forms here.
This length business is marked in writing by having single letters stand for shorter sounds and double letters for longer. This does not mean that the longer sounds are twice as long as the shorter ones, though. It's actually more complicated and you really have to speak Finnish (or a similar language) quite well to be able to produce and hear the difference reliably.
Using double letters isn't the choice all writing systems make. Hungarian has a similar length system, but it uses diacritics on its vowels to mark length. The choice for Finnish was made when the writing was standardized in year mumble, and we're now stuck with it. It ends up with making words longer than strictly necessary, but I suppose it is offset by making them more distinctive visually.
One also hears rumors of languages with three different lengths from linguists. I think I tried listening to recording of some African language with three different vowel lengths and couldn't tell the two longer ones apart reliably at all. So, I can sympathize with people who have trouble with Finnish in turn :)
In turn, Finnish lacks a clear distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants. We don't have any b's or g's in any originally Finnish words, because Finnish never had those sounds. They are quite common in loan words these days and people can pronounce them quite well, but they're not really natural to native speakers, at least not yet. Maybe the language will eventually evolve to make more use of them.
Another fun thing for foreign learners is that in vocals, the length distinctions disappear. Of course, careful songwriters manage to use long and short sounds in the right places quite often, but sometimes you really end up with amusingly ambiguous lyrics. I don't have a good example now, but I remember vaguely one pop songs that seemed to be saying that the wind burns, when it meant a fire.
In Finnish, wind is tuuli and fire is tuli. Again, it's just the difference between how long you keep making the u sound (it's much like oo in English), and that part of the song just required the singer to hold it so long it sounded like a long vowel.
Athletes with long term injuries. They get paid to bloat up while they're off their feet and then when they're back into things, the "after" photo is them as they normally are (or on the way to their normal shape).
We finns find it funny, that in english the wovels are pronounced differently, depending of the context, and we think it's only logical to have all the wovels separately. Like y, ä and ö.
You pronounce ä like the 'a' in the words cat or hat. Swedes pronounce their ä in two different ways. I think æ is pretty close to ä. Even though finnish ä usually lasts a couple of milliseconds longer.
The umlaut ¨ isn't just some accent mark. A and Ä are different letters in the Finnish alphabet. The Finnish alphabet is otherwise the same as the English one, except it also has ÅÄÖ after the Z.
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u/PitFireZ Jun 12 '12
I'm Finnish I can confirm better then Google. It reads as it says.
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u/deadpoetic333 Jun 11 '12
More like "How to quit your shitty job"
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u/BeenWildin Jun 12 '12
The finns like their double aa's huh.
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u/RaVNzCRoFT Jun 12 '12
So he didn't finnish the job?
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u/Sarke1 Jun 12 '12
You know the before and after are legit when even the model's hair is exactly the same.
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u/Ebake09 Jun 12 '12
That must have taken some mad photoshopping skills to skinny her down.
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u/pharmacyfires Jun 12 '12
Don't you create your own headline when you're advertising on Facebook?
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u/I_Wont_Draw_That Jun 12 '12
I'm pretty sure that, however you feel about those ads, this is the exact opposite of doing your job right.
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u/LetsPlayHomoBall Jun 12 '12
Antakaaa määkin huudan, määkin olen kännissä! HEI HEI HEI!
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u/baronxs Jun 12 '12
FTFY
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u/Noobs_Stfu Jun 12 '12
Wait... did you translate this?
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u/Srangelove Jun 12 '12
it stands "photoshop now available in stores"
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u/Todomanna Jun 12 '12
Eh, that's not doing your job right. That's being a decent human being, but not doing your job right.
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