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Questions & Answers about Sade on kylmä.
I thought "it is raining" was "sataa". What is "sade"?
Sataa is the verb meaning "it is raining". Sade is the noun meaning "the rain". Since "the rain" is the subject of this sentence, we use the noun form.
Why isn't "kylmä" in the partitive case ("kylmää") here?
The adjective matches the subject. Even though rain is made of water (which is a mass noun and would use the partitive: vesi on kylmää), the word sade (the rain) is treated grammatically as a single, complete entity. Therefore, its adjective stays in the basic nominative case: kylmä.
How would I use the season cases from this lesson with this sentence?
You can easily add a season using the adessive case (-lla/-llä) you are learning. For example, to say "In autumn, the rain is cold," you would just add syksyllä to the sentence: Syksyllä sade on kylmä.
How do we know it means "THE rain is cold" rather than just "Rain is cold"?
Finnish doesn't have articles like "a" or "the". Sade on kylmä can mean both "the rain is cold" (referring to the weather right now) or "rain is cold" (as a general fact). You rely entirely on the context of the conversation to know which one is meant.