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Questions & Answers about Mies istuu junassa.
Why does the translation say "on the train" if -ssa means "in"?
Languages often disagree on which prepositions to use! In English, we ride "on" a train, bus, or plane. But in Finnish, you are physically inside the vehicle, so you use the "in" ending (-ssa). Therefore, juna (train) becomes junassa (in/on the train).
Why is the ending -ssa instead of -ssä?
This is because of vowel harmony. The word juna contains the back vowels u and a. Because it has back vowels, the ending must also use a back vowel, which is why we add -ssa instead of its front-vowel twin -ssä.
Where is the word for "is" in this sentence?
Finnish doesn't use a separate verb for "is doing" something (the continuous tense). The single verb istuu can mean either "sits" or "is sitting" depending on the context. You do not need to add the Finnish word for "is" (on) to say "is sitting".
How do we know it means "The man" and not "A man"?
Finnish doesn't have articles like "a" or "the". Mies can mean "a man" or "the man". Usually, if the noun comes at the very beginning of the sentence like this, it refers to a specific person we already know about, making "the man" the most natural translation.