Breakdown of Me palkkaamme ehdokkaan, jonka haastattelu on tänään.
olla
to be
me
we
tänään
today
haastattelu
interview
Questions & Answers about Me palkkaamme ehdokkaan, jonka haastattelu on tänään.
Why does this sentence use jonka instead of joka?
jonka is the genitive (possessive) form of the relative pronoun joka (which/who). Just like we use "whose" in English to show possession, Finnish uses the genitive case to show that the interview belongs to the candidate.
The English translation says "We will hire", but isn't palkkaamme just the present tense?
Yes, it is! Finnish doesn't have a separate future tense. Instead, you use the present tense for both things happening right now and things that will happen in the future. The context usually makes it clear which one it is.
Why is the candidate written as ehdokkaan instead of the basic dictionary form ehdokas?
ehdokkaan is the object of the sentence (the person being hired). Because the action of hiring someone is a completed, whole action, the object takes the accusative case. For singular nouns, this case looks exactly like the genitive case, ending in -n.
How do you get the form ehdokkaan from the base word ehdokas?
Nouns ending in -as or -äs have a special rule when you add case endings. You drop the -s and lengthen the vowel before it. So, ehdokas turns into the stem ehdokkaa-, and then we add the -n ending to get ehdokkaan.