Are you fascinated by the Finnish language and would like to learn it? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
Finnish is spoken by about 5 million people worldwide, mostly in Finland and by minorities in Sweden and Norway.
Whatever your reasons are for Learning Finnish—whether personal or professional—you need a well-structured study plan with quality resources to get you started. The resources you choose to start learning Finnish work well if you have a clear understanding of your language goals, needs, and preferences.
We tried and tested various Finnish resources from apps, classes, lessons, tutors, and others to come up with a list of the best apps to learn Finnish and help you work on your grammar, vocabulary, and overall language skills. You’ll reach fluency in no time. Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Resources for Learning Finnish Online
We’ll explore many types of resources that will keep your learning adventure engaging at every level.
Best Apps to Learn Finnish + Courses and Lessons
Especially if you’re starting from scratch, language courses and apps can give you a foundation in Finnish.
Mango Languages
The step-by-step Finnish lessons from Mango Languages will get you to speak right away. The limited material is best for beginners — specifically, ones who are planning to use Finnish for travel and a little socializing.
The lessons are peppered with cultural notes and a few grammar explanations. Auditory learners might enjoy the constant audio engagement from the automated coach who leads you through the lessons. Overall, we found Mango Languages to be easy to use and helpful for learners who are new to the language.
Duolingo
One of the best-known apps for learning languages, Duolingo offers a gamified approach that introduces new concepts with easy-to-digest lessons. Exercises include translations, short dictations, vocabulary matching, and identifying the sounds of Finnish words.
Duolingo’s Finnish course is relatively short, compared to its offerings for languages such as French and Spanish. Even so, it can provide a fairly solid introduction to the language for beginners.
Finnish mounted policemen in residential Helsinki neighborhood
Anna, a native Finnish speaker, and Finnish teacher, produced a video review of Duolingo’s Finnish course. Although she likes the course overall, she notes that there are a few strange word usage and pronunciation errors. This latter point jibes with the audio issues we noted in our review of Duolingo.
Memrise
A popular app for language learners, Memrise comes through with numerous Finnish courses. Here are a few courses you might find helpful at the beginner-to-early-intermediate level:
- Survival Finnish has really good, clear audio, with very useful basic phrases for travelers. Unfortunately, it’s very limited, as it only teaches 28 words and phrases.
- Finnish Street Phrases covers conversation and slang, but now there seems to be no audio.
- Beginner’s Finnish by toby1kenobi has a great deal of vocabulary — over five hundred words — as well as clear audio throughout. However, the words don’t seem to be categorized in any particular way. For example, the numbers from one to ten are divided up among four different levels of the course.
- To get a jump start on understanding Finnish, consider learning the 3000 Most Common Finnish Words, which was developed by sehiralti. By presenting you with the most commonly used words first, this course follows the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule.
- The Basic Finnish Grammar course created by leslieulfandre can teach you about pronouns, as well as some of the Finnish cases. It could be a bit confusing, though. For example, hän is defined only as “he” in English; in Finnish, it means both “he” and “she.” The Personal Pronouns unit in the Beginner’s Finnish course by chempsall seems clearer.
- The Finnish Grammar course by rodrigo.p.reis.7, which is based upon the grammar lessons on the Uusi kielemme website, breaks down several of the cases in great detail. One downside, however, is the lack of audio. Still, this course is useful for drilling concepts such as noun declensions (inflections), verb conjugations, and how to make plurals.
Intermediate and advanced learners seem to have fewer choices among Memrise courses than beginners do. And Memrise addresses grammar points more through memorization than explanation. Nonetheless, we consider it an effective way to build vocabulary, especially for beginners.
FinnishPod101
A podcast-style course, FinnishPod101 will expose you to the spoken language, right from the start. The lessons include vocabulary and grammar tips, as well as cultural tidbits. We found that the organization can be lacking, though. You’ll probably want to supplement this course with other resources.
Pimsleur
If you’re “all ears” when you’re learning a language, you may favor the Pimsleur method. We felt that the lessons were structured well and that the audio-heavy approach gave learners the flexibility to study hands-free. However, if you crave written components to your lessons, you might not find Pimsleur as appealing as other types of courses.
Lighthouse in Oulu, Finland
Glossika
Glossika has colloquial Finnish lessons for learners at all levels. The focus is on listening and speaking, but there’s little grammar covered. Based on our experience with Glossika, you may find it overpriced if you’re only planning to study one language with it.
FSI Conversational Finnish Course
Live Lingua Project hosts both the textbook and the workbook for the Foreign Service Institute’s Conversational Finnish course. Both of these resources come with audio files and incredibly thorough explanations of Finnish grammar, pronunciation, and grammar.
You can also find the complete FSI Conversational Finnish course on the FSI Language Courses website, where you have the option to either access the course online in your browser or download it in its entirety.
The FSI course is completely free. It was designed to teach the language to diplomats, so it can be a bit stilted. Nonetheless, it can give you a comprehensive grounding in the Finnish language.
As we discovered while reviewing this resource, the “catch” is that these courses are dated and have a rather dull interface, hearkening back to the age of photocopied textbooks and audiocassettes.
Beach cabin, Finland
Venla
This site is currently “under maintenance”; it seems like there have been no updates since 2017. Nonetheless, there are a number of well-organized, online lessons to explore, and they appear to be free.
At this juncture, the user guide is defunct, several of the links are broken, the audio seems altogether missing, and many of the exercises don’t seem to work well (if at all). All that said, the lessons might be worth a look, if only for their clear cultural notes, dialogues, and grammar explanations.
Finking Cap Club
This is a membership site where you can subscribe, for a moderately expensive monthly fee, to Finnish lessons that include Zoom sessions (as well as independent study).
To get a free taste of their teaching methods, try their YouTube channel — and their blog, which often features Finnish listening exercises.
Osaan Suomea (I Can Speak Finnish)
Ready to plunge into the Gulf of Finland?
No?
How about diving headfirst into Finnish-only language lessons?
Purple lightning on water, Finland
If you’d like to try learning Finnish through Finnish, you can check out Vanajavesi College’s Osaan Suomea (I Can Speak Finnish) program. There are video and audio lessons, written materials, and plenty of interactive exercises. Best of all, the online program appears to be free.
Other Course Options
At this time, neither Rosetta Stone nor Busuu has a Finnish course available.
Given our unfavorable reviews of Loecsen, Bluebird Languages, 17 Minute Languages, and Cudoo, we would not count them among our top picks for Finnish learners. These resources tend to be somewhat disorganized, not very intuitive to use, and rife with errors.
Learn Finnish with These Additional Apps and Tools
Round out your coursework with these supplementary resources and tools.
Language Exchange Apps
When you’re ready to start speaking Finnish with a conversation partner, these language exchange apps will facilitate the process of finding someone to chat with or text in Finnish.
Practicing Finnish conversation in a relaxed setting
We gave Tandem, Hello Talk, and My Language Exchange fairly high marks for their ease of use and large communities of active participants. Speaky is also a solid choice, but we found its features a bit limited.
Finnish Language Tutor Marketplaces
If you’d like the services of a tutor to give you one-on-one guidance with your Finnish studies, we would say that both italki and Verbling could suit your needs admirably. We also found Preply useful, although not quite as streamlined as Verbling and italki.
Other possible resources for filling your Finnish tutoring needs:
Online Finnish Grammar Reference
For looking up grammar points, Panu Mäkinen’s site is a reliable resource with lots of examples.
Joel Yliluoma’s page on Finnish grammatical cases breaks down all the inflections Finnish words might undergo to indicate changes in meaning.
Typing in Finnish
Typing in Finnish with a regular QWERTY keyboard is fairly easy. To produce the ä and ö letters often found in Finnish, as well as the Swedish O (å) you can simply type in the following number code while holding down the ALT key of a Windows computer keyboard:
| Finnish Letter |
ALT Code |
| ä | ALT+0228 |
| Ä | ALT+0196 |
| ö | ALT+0246 |
| Ö | ALT+0214 |
| å | ALT+0229 |
| Å | ALT+0197 |
Penn State University has a page devoted to the codes you need to type letters found in Finnish, as well as Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The codes from Penn State should cover both Windows and Macintosh computers.
You can also use an online Finnish keyboard, like the ones from Branah, TypingBaba, and Lexilogos.
The special letters you need for typing on your mobile devices are generally available on the built-in virtual keyboards.
Language Exercises, Games, and Flashcards
These resources give you additional practice with Finnish grammar and vocab.
Finnish Language Exercises
Sano suomeksi features Finnish language exercises for beginner and intermediate learners, broken down by CEFR level.
For intermediate to advanced Finnish learners, Clozemaster provides practice with vocabulary in context. Beyond the huge bank of fill-in-the-blanks sentences to try, we discovered that Clozemaster offers some additional features under its paid plan that might be worth a look.
Mölkky, also called Finska, is a modern take on kyykkä (Karelian skittles)
Finnish Language Games
Maybe you shouldn’t play with your food, but you should definitely play with your words!
Digital Dialects brings a little fun to your Finnish studies with a variety of vocabulary topics and retro-style games. In addition to fundamentals like numbers, colors, animal words, and months of the year, there are vocabulary builders, games to teach you Finnish phrases, and games for intermediate learners.
Lingo-Play is styled as a course with lessons, but the Play is the thing that really keeps you learning. Through word scrambles, true/false questions, and matching, you can quiz yourself on your mastery of Finnish vocabulary.
The Vimpelin Veto play the Koskenkorvan Urheilijat at pesäpallo (“Finnish baseball”)
Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Even a simple book of Beginner's Finnish Word Searches can get you more comfortable with Finnish words. You can also try Double Puzzles #009 - Bilingual Word Search - English Clues - Finnish Words by James Michael Melott or Learn Finnish with Word Search Puzzles by David Solenky.
Flashcard Apps
Quizlet is a hybrid flashcard and language game app. As with Memrise, the quality of the community-sourced content is not always consistent. That said, Quizlet offers flashcard decks for many languages — including Finnish — and, in our experience, the games created from each flashcard deck can add a fun twist.
When it comes to build-your-own flashcard apps, we believe that Anki is one of the most flexible, highly customizable ones available. We would consider Brainscape a good alternative to Anki; Brainscape has a sleeker interface than Anki, but you won’t have quite as many options for tweaking your flashcard decks.
Studying Finnish on-the-go with a flashcard app
Study Stack has hundreds of Finnish flashcard decks to choose from. These pre-made decks are community-sourced from teachers and fellow learners. You can also play word games, such as Hangman, Crossword, and matching, based on individual StudyStack decks. Register to make your own flashcard decks.
We feel that WordBit is a flashcard app with an interesting approach: It superimposes a flashcard over your phone’s lock screen, thereby prompting you to study Finnish each time you open your phone.
Podcasts for Learning Finnish
In addition to the podcasts we recommend for Finnish learners, three podcasts were suggested by the Finnished channel on YouTube:
- Auta Antti! (Help Anti) is hosted by actor and writer Antti Holma. In the podcast, Antti answers listeners’ questions and explores a wide variety of topics, from the everyday to the existential. It’s good for intermediate learners and is somewhat easy to follow since there’s only one speaker. It’s available on Radiot and Apple Podcasts.
- Bloggers Alexa Dagmara and Linda Juhola bring you Nonsense, which you can stream on Soundcloud. The two friends chat rapidly in Southern Finnish style, truncating many words as they talk about fashion, makeup, everyday life, family, and personal relationships.
- Lilli and Helena are two Finns who live in France. They host Kahvihetkiä maailmalla (Café au lait), in which they interview Finnish expats in places as far-flung as Vietnam, Canada, Panama, and Moscow.
Finnish media website Radiot has several other podcasts you can try, on just about every topic imaginable.
YouTube for Finnish Learners
If you like learning with YouTube videos, you’re in luck: There’s no lack of choices when it comes to finding Finnish channels for learners.
Learn Finnish with FinnishPod101.com provides structured playlists for all levels. There’s reading practice, vocabulary, and listening comprehension exercises, as well as study tips and cultural notes. The Learn Finnish with Finking Cap channel has a similar setup, with bite-sized videos for beginners.
KatChats Finnish is hosted by a bilingual Finnish-English speaker. It’s targeted at both beginners and intermediate learners. It has plenty of material about vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Kat also has a series of videos completely in Finnish, with optional English subtitles.
Several YouTube channels have Finnish lessons, covering many topics
Finnish with Anna is home to a few dozen well-ordered video lessons, with new ones being added on a somewhat regular basis. The videos are generally between ten and twenty minutes long, and cover a wide range of grammar and vocabulary topics. The lessons have clear written material, which Anna reviews slowly and patiently. It would work well for beginners.
To learn to “Speak like a Finn, not like a book,” try LearnFastFinnishDirty. It’s Finnish for beginners, with everyday vocabulary, verb lessons, and an emphasis on speaking. The channel also teaches you to read Finnish news and learn Finnish through music.
The Finnished channel will probably work best for intermediate learners. It uses the “comprehensible input” theory of American linguist Stephen Krashen. The audio portion of the videos is entirely in Finnish; there are Finnish captions, paired with English subtitles, that you can turn on if you are in the lower-intermediate phase of your learning. Rather than emphasizing grammar, the Finnished channel takes a “learn by listening” approach to teach natural, everyday Finnish. There is a lot of repetition; ideally, you should rewatch each video several times, until you understand about 75% of it without the subtitles.
Her Finland isn’t focused entirely on language learning, but there are several videos devoted to it. These include videos recommending books and courses for learning Finnish. A few videos give pronunciation tips, or cover themes such as Finnish greetings and proverbs. The channel is also helpful for learners who want to learn more about Finnish culture and how Finnish people relate to others. The channel is frequently updated with new videos.
Intermediate to advanced learners who are interested in healthy eating, goal-setting, ecology, and fitness might try the juulialilja (July Lily) channel.