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Oops. It was "do for". It is English that is difficult, not Finnish.

No, suomenkieli on liian vaikea. Miksi olet oranssi?

According to my translator that sentence is perfect. Well done!

Krabo is tired of the blues. He's celebrating the lovely bright colour orange, the colour of the Dutch royal house and their national colour. The Dutch planted thousands of marigolds when the war ended, to celebrate their freedom after the Nazi occupation.

As far as I'm aware it doesn't have anything to do with Finland (Suomi) but it doesn't have to...

Which translator do you use, Enviro? I usually stick with Google. which also thinks they were perfect sentences by the way, so well done Moomin!

I didn't know orange was the Dutch national color, nor that they have a national color for that matter. Funny you should mention WW2. In connection with there being 70 years since the end of WW2, there have been lots about it on the news and documentaries. One nice series was called Okkupert hverdag (Occupied every day life). What made it so interesting was that it was told by and through the eyes of regular people, giving an insight in what it was like living then. It's just been a little bit on my mind lately. I wish I knew someone old enough to be able to tell me in person.
I wish my grandparents had told me more about it... I wish I had asked more questions when they lived. I wish I knew more about them period...

I also use Google Translate; often it doesn't know how to translate bad sentences. So when it translates a phrase or sentence perfectly I know it's a good sentence!

My gran used to tell me a few things about those times because even here they took precautions such as blacking out at night, although I have serious doubts that the Germans would have flown thousands of kilometres to drop bombs here. Probably simply because the country actively supported the Allied forces as did NZ and Australia.

We can split hairs here. The sentence is theoretically correct, in some other context. In this particular case, Mooms should have used the partitive case ("vaikeaa" instead of "vaikea"), but considering she has just started to learn those details, yes, I agree, her sentence is excellent Finnish.

Excellent sentences! I paid attention especially to your expression "No," where the comma is essential. The Finnish "no" is generally a stumbling block for foreign students who are instinctively trying to identify it with the English "no".

P.S. Enviro selitti miksi olen oranssi.

You should post a few Finnish cartoons and /. or comics for her. How about Tintin in Finnish? Snoopy? Garfield?

^ Sounds like a good idea!

Indeed.

Hmm... I doubt the Germans would fly that far south, at least at first.
My grandfather told me about his sister and her husband being active in the resistance, and that he helped them by writing names on envelopes and that even that little could be dangerous. He also mentioned a small deliberate act of sabotage where he had some debris emptied in the wrong place, slowing down the project slightly. He also handed some smokes to Russian POWs (which might not be a good thing seen with today's eyes, but was an act of kindness then). My grandmother told me about a friend she'd had, who was Jewish and she and my grandfather urged her to go to Sweden. The girl's father and brothers had already gone there, but she and the mother of the family were taken and died in a concentration camp. That's all they've said about it.



OMG, Finnish sounds impossible

Holland, a small country though it is, has had much to give to Europe and to England in particular. It was for some time a love-hate relationship but in the end, these two famous persons named William of Orange (William I the Silent, William III of England) did a lot good things for Holland and England.

Oh, no. It is Norwegian that sounds impossible. Danish, of course, sounds incredible.

Dear Krabo - why is it partitive? This is what always confuses me. I swear you Finnish make things partitive depending on which way the wind is blowing.

Dear enviro - google translate is notoriously bad at Finnish. Sometimes you put something in and complete garbage comes out.

Also, did you know that carrots used to be purple, and the Dutch invented / created orange ones. Now those are the standard. Look it up.

Dear Skilpadde - hi.

Our partitive - like the sauna, too - were invented in Russia. Then we adopted them both and made of them something our very own. Blame the Russians.

The wind, by the way, is not partitive-depending but elative-depending.

^ Finnish people will be the death of me. Why is it partitive?

Ok, I can try to explain. - If you express something using the nominative case, like "it is fun" = "se on hauska", your intention is to imply that this something is fun from beginning to end. If you use the partitive case, like "it is fun" = "se on hauskaa", your intention is to imply that at least the greater part of this something is fun. Think about the name of the case, partitive. It readily gives the impression you are dealing with not the whole, but a part.

Why do we use the singular partitive with numerals, like "three cats" = "kolme kissaa"? Same reason - three cats from among all the cats in the world.

I understand the basic premise of partitive, but I still don't understand why I would use it here.

Can I not say that all of Finnish is hard, or am I saying that Finnish is hard but maybe other languages are not.

I know you say kolme kissaa, but then you say yksi kissa. He's not the only cat in the world!

Suomenkieli ei ole helppo.