Questions & Answers about Tämä oli kauhea vahinko!
The lesson is about Type 2 verbs, so why does oli look different?
oli is the past tense of olla (to be), which is a highly irregular Type 3 verb. Even though you are currently learning how Type 2 verbs form the past tense by dropping the first vowel of their diphthong (like syödä becoming söi), olla is so fundamental that it appears in almost every story or description. Its third-person past tense is simply oli.
Why aren't kauhea and vahinko in the partitive case?
This is a classic "A is B" sentence. Because vahinko (accident) is a single, countable thing, both the adjective kauhea and the noun stay in the basic nominative case. You would only use the partitive here if the noun were an uncountable mass noun, such as saying "This was terrible coffee" (Tämä oli kauheaa kahvia).
I've seen the word vahingossa before. How is it related to vahinko in this sentence?
Vahingossa is a very common adverb that means "by accident" or "accidentally"—it literally translates to "in a mistake" using the inessive case (-ssa). In this sentence, we aren't describing how something happened, but rather what it was, so we just use the basic noun form: vahinko.
Could I say Se oli kauhea vahinko! instead?
Yes, but the feeling changes slightly. Tämä (this) implies the accident just happened, or the mess is right in front of the speaker. If you were telling a story about an accident that happened in the past and you are no longer at the scene, you would naturally use se (it/that) instead.
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