Questions & Answers about Minä pidän tästä elokuvasta.
Why do the words for "this movie" end in -sta and -stä? I thought the current lesson said those endings mean "out of" or "from"?
You are exactly right that the elative case (-sta / -stä) usually tells us where something comes from. However, in Finnish, the verb pitää (to like) is special: it always requires the thing you like to be in the elative case. You can think of it as getting a good feeling from the movie!
The dictionary word for "this" is tämä. How does it become tästä here?
In Finnish, describing words must match the grammatical case of the noun they describe. Since elokuvasta is in the elative case, the word for "this" must also be in the elative case. The pronoun tämä has an irregular shape change: the -mä drops off, and we add the ending -stä to the base tä-, giving us tästä.
Why does tästä use the -stä ending, while elokuvasta uses the -sta ending?
This is a perfect example of vowel harmony! Words with front vowels like ä, ö, or y (such as the root of tämä) must take the front-vowel ending -stä. Words with back vowels like a, o, or u (such as the vowels in elokuva) take the back-vowel ending -sta.
Is it okay to drop the word minä and just say pidän tästä elokuvasta?
Yes, absolutely! Because the verb pidän already has the personal -n ending that tells us "I" am doing the action, the pronoun minä is completely optional. Including it just puts a little extra emphasis on the fact that you personally like it.
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