Breakdown of Minä haluan poseerata heidän kanssaan.
minä
I
he
they
haluta
to want
kanssa
with
poseerata
to pose
Questions & Answers about Minä haluan poseerata heidän kanssaan.
Why does the word kanssa have an -an at the end in this sentence?
This is a key rule for inflecting postpositions! When a postposition like kanssa (with) is used with a personal pronoun like heidän (them/their), the postposition must take a possessive suffix. The -an is the third-person suffix that matches heidän.
I thought the third-person possessive suffix was -nsa. Why is it -an here?
Finnish actually has two versions of the third-person possessive suffix: -nsa/-nsä and -Vn (where V means doubling the preceding vowel). Because kanssa ends in an a, you can add -an to get kanssaan. You could technically also say heidän kanssansa, but kanssaan is much more common and natural.
Can I drop the word heidän and just say Minä haluan poseerata kanssaan?
No, you must keep heidän here. In standard Finnish, you can often drop the first- and second-person genitive pronouns (like minun or sinun) when you use a possessive suffix, but you cannot drop the third-person pronouns (hänen and heidän).
Why is the verb poseerata used instead of a conjugated form like poseeraan?
It follows the verb haluan (I want). Just like in English ("I want to pose"), when you have a verb chain like this, the first verb is conjugated (haluan) and the second verb stays in its basic dictionary form, the infinitive (poseerata). This happens to be a Type 4 verb, which is why it ends in -ata.
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