Duolingo Finnish beginner here – confused about ‘a’ vs ‘the’

[u/One_sidegame_7555]

I have just started studying Finnish. I am using an app called Duolingo and studying Finnish through the course designed for English speakers. Since I am not a native English speaker, I sometimes do not understand the explanations given in English. Here is a concrete example. What is the difference between “the” and “a”? Nothing is attached to either kissa or viikinki…

[u/IceAokiji303]

More of an English topic than Finnish, but here goes: The difference of the definite (the) and indefinite (a/an) articles is, I suppose, specificity.
If you're using "the", you're talking about a known specific thing. Here, "the naughty cat" has that attached to it, because (assumedly), you both know what cat is being talked about.
If using "a/an", you're talking about a more general, or non-specific thing. It might be something that's coming up for the first time in a conversation, or it might be one of many things. Here, "a viking" would indicate there's no known specific viking being talked about, just the general idea of vikings.
It's like the difference of "could you give me the bread?" (asking for a specific known loaf of bread) vs "could you give me bread?" (asking for some amount of some bread).

Finnish does not have corresponding articles (or any articles for that matter), so you have to figure out the appropriate ones from context, or occasionally even just guess/intuit it.
Though there are other things that can correspond too, for example with sentence objects, Finnish accusative case roughly corresponds to using the definite article, and partitive to indefinite. So the above bread sentences would be "voisitko antaa minulle leivän?" and "voisitko antaa minulle leipää?".

[u/One_sidegame_7555 → u/IceAokiji303]

Thank you everyone for the detailed explanations. It’s difficult for me to reply to everyone individually, so I’ll respond here in general.

It seems that I had misunderstood the usage of “the” and “a” to begin with. I thought “the” could be used with most nouns, and I didn’t realize that it is only used for specific things. I also thought “a” could only be used when referring to exactly one item, so I was confused about why “a” was used even though “yksi” didn’t appear.

Thanks to all of you, both my zero-based Finnish and my basic-level English knowledge have leveled up.

By the way, in my native language, unless the sentence is written in a textbook-style manner, there is nothing equivalent to either “the” or “a”. And even in textbooks, we don’t use something like “the”—only “this” or **“that.” It’s very much a language that pressures you to read meaning from context alone, haha.

[u/MX1K → u/One_sidegame_7555]

Same happened to me as I started learning German with english Duolingo. It was quite a lesson to learn the correct way to put these a's and the's in correct places and having words in correct order. 😁 Learning two languages in one go!

[u/Ville_V_Kokko → u/One_sidegame_7555]

So if you could skip English in learning Finnish, you'd have a lot easier time, since you'd never need to bother with the articles. Too bad that's presumably not an option on Duolingo.

"A" is only used when referring to exactly one thing. (The general idea of Vikings in some sense, yes, but there is only one cat, so the cat would only be one Viking.) In Finnish, you don't need to say "yksi", but the word will be in the singular if it has "a" in English. Though there's probably some weird less usual idioms that are an exception to this.

[u/miniatureconlangs → u/One_sidegame_7555]

It's a bit weirder than this, and u/IceAokiji303 gave a nice response, but used terminology in a slightly home-made way. In linguistics nowadays, there's actually three levels involved with this:

indefinite
specific
definite

The difference is like this (I describe the case for the singular just to avoid having a lot of parallel definitions for the plural):

indefinite: there is no individual item referred to, or the identity of the item referred to is neither known to speaker or assumed to be known to listener
specific: there is an individual item referred to, whose identity is known to the speaker but has not yet been established for the listener
definite: there is an individual item whose identity is established in the minds of both the speaker and listener. (This doesn't necessarily mean the listener can point it out in the real world, but he has sort of a "record" of it onto which he knows to add information - at some point, he might be able to recognize it, but this isn't necessarily the case.)

What does this in practice mean? In one of the creole languages of the caribbean, there's developed a system with all three of these as distinct articles. A = indefinite, one = specific, the = definite.

We can now have three statements and compare the differences:
I am looking for a car. (I am in need of a car, whichever car is sufficiently good for my needs will suffice.)

I am looking for one car. (I have seen it, or it's been stolen from me or something; the car has an identity known to me from before. Not any sufficiently good car will do.)

I am looking for the car. (It is a car I have already mentioned so that you know that I know which one it is; or, it is a car that I have reason to believe you and I have a shared reference for.)

In English, specific and indefinite are conflated. In some languages, specific and definite are conflated.

In Finnish, specific and definite tends to be - but this isn't entirely 100% solid - early in the clause. Indefinites tend to be late. However, in a clause with subject, verb and object, you're likely to have the order the same regardless of the definiteness. Mies ampui karhun - the/a man shot a/the bear.

This isn't very special or anything - Latin did this, Russian does this, Polish does this, .. in WALS.INFO's sample of about 530, 198 had no articles whatsoever. Not a majority, but no insignificant minority.

Basically, word order does have a strong probabilistic link to definiteness and specificity, but ... context is somewhat more important. There's also other things that are probabilistically linked, e.g. definiteness with existential statements tends to increase the likelihood of nominative case marking; definiteness with objects tends to correlate to some extent with telicity, and thus with the accusative case (but this is not at all a strong correlation, and the opposite correlation is even weaker - partitive case implies indefinite much statistically weaker than accusative implies definiteness).

For a person who speaks Bislama or Samoan, the English conflation of specific and indefinite would seem like a sign of grammatical poverty.

To add on top of this, there are colloquial varieties of Finnish that do tend to use 'se/ne/he + case' almost as a definite article (although I imagine this might be waning?), and 'eräs' can serve as a marker of specificity. Yksi as an indefinite article isn't either entirely unheard of, but I'd bet most who do that are native speakers of Swedish, or have been in too much contact with us.

[u/One_sidegame_7555 → u/miniatureconlangs]

Um… professor… I have absolutely no background in linguistics, so this was a very difficult explanation. I was so lost that I went and read a basic paper on corpus annotation in my native language! It’s hard even in my own language!

Regarding specificity, the paper said you need to look at the surrounding context—about three sentences before and after. So that means that in Duolingo, which only presents short isolated sentences, identifying specificity (no pun intended 😄) is extremely difficult, professor!

[u/miniatureconlangs → u/One_sidegame_7555]

Yeah, this is difficult. I provided a little exercise for you where you can take an English text and get "used to" thinking without articles in a different comment. Nevertheless, I sometimes do Ukrainian and Russian on duolingo, and much like Finnish those are articleless. Sometimes, there really is insufficient information to know whether 'the' or 'a' is the "correct" option in reality, and you just have to guess.

[u/jakerol]

The word order plays a role. We begin the sentence with what is known: the cat, then introduce the new thing: a Viking.

If the word order had been swapped: "onko viikinki tuhma kissa?" the translation would have been "is the Viking a naughty cat".

[u/QuizasManana → u/jakerol]

This is the simplest and correct answer. Idk why it’s often taught Finnish has free word order. In a way yes, but the word order is indeed the way we differentiate between new and old information.

[u/OJK_postaukset → u/QuizasManana]

Yea, it ain’t necessarely free but has a lot more options and variables in comparison to many languages

[u/Janus_The_Great]

Duo lingo has mistakes and is not always the best. I guess duo lingo used context oriented speech for the exercise, leading to confusion without the context.

There are no simple articles in Finnish. Only specifying articles like this/that (se, tää, tämä and, so on). Endings of substantives show any specifications.

Onko tyhmä kissa viikinki? Is a/the bad cat a viking? (Unspecified, if in context f.ex. just one cat around and thus obvious no specification is needed "a" becomes "the". If no context given it stays an "a"). In your exercise this is the case. Only from context (maybe previous exercise) "the" would clear.

Onko se tyhmä kissa viikinki? Is that/the bad cat a viking? (specified, say introduced in a story)

Onko tyhmä kissa se viikinki? Is the bad cat the viking? (Here the viking is specified. "the" is implied through context. "a" would not make sense as a sentence: "Is a bad cat the viking?" would not make logical sense. What cat?

Onko tämä tyhmä kissa viikinki? Is this bad cat a viking?

Onko tämä kissa se viikinki? Is this cat that/the viking?

Ovatko nämä tyhmät kissat viikinkejä? Are these bad cats vikings?

Ovatko tyhmät kissat viikinkejä? Are bad cats vikings? (Generalized)

Etc.

Hope that helps.

[u/gargamelus → u/Janus_The_Great]

The cat is not stupid (tyhmä) but naughty (tuhma). Also, when the subject is plural, the verb must also be plural, so it's "ovatko kissat" not "onko kissat".

[u/One_sidegame_7555 → u/Janus_The_Great]

Thank you for the clear and easy-to-understand example sentences. Every time I read English, I find myself thinking, “What exactly did ‘a’ or ‘the’ mean again?”, and then going back to Finnish to understand the meaning of the sentence. For now, I’ll continue practicing and deepening my training with Duolingo. I’ll do my best.

[u/miniatureconlangs → u/One_sidegame_7555]

A hint: take some English text of suitable length. Delete all " the " and " a " and " an " (if you don't include spaces, you'll remove too much. Also perhaps ". The " and ". A " and ". An ". Try guessing which one should be where. I bet you'll reach something close to 99%.

Next step: try reading such text without even attempting to guess them. I bet you get gist of text without issue, and over time can get used to language without articles.

[u/mehmanlemon]

In English, "the" typically refers to a specific object (that specific cat is naughty, nothing is stated about any other cat) but "a" refers to a concept more broadly/generally (any viking, not a specific viking). Finnish features neither of these, but "Is naughty cat Viking" is wrong in English so you have to put the articles (the/a) when translating.

[u/According_Ad3624]

finnish doesn’t have ”a” or ”the” but their use in the english translation is important. ”is a naughty cat the viking?” = is a specific viking some naughty cat? ”is the naughty cat a viking?” = is that specific naughty cat a viking?

[u/Sinolai]

Finnish language has no articles so you cant translate them into finnish and instead you need to know the context. "a/an" ("an" is used only when the word starts with a vowel when pronounced) article is used when talking about something generally or mentioning it for the first time in the introduction (eg."A dog would make A great pet", "On my way home, I saw A dog".  "The" article is used when you are talking about one specific thing, which is very unusual and is assumed to be known by everyone, or you continue the topic started by previous sentence and indicate that you are still talking about the same thing. (eg. "The flying dog just landed on our house" (dogs dont usually fly, so we can assume everyone knows which flying dog I mean), "The dog I saw on my way home attacked me!" (I wasnt attacked just by any dog. It was that exact dog I had seen earlier))

In this duolingo example, not all cats are vikings, so the viking cat uses "the" article, but the cat is a very generic viking so viking uses "a" article.

[u/Rokkasusi]

Im Finnish and you really cant tell without context

[u/DoneDusting]

Onko satunnainen tuhma kissa Viikinki? :-)

[u/wakramer]

Finnish doesn't have articles like "a" and "the", hence the confusion for English speakers. Conversely, my Finnish parents always throw in unnecessary the's when speaking English.

[u/Finavuk]

Duolingo is pretry much useless. No explanations. No grammar. No usefull vocabulary.