Word
Sokkotreffeillä meillä ei ollut kemiaa.
Meaning
We didn't have any chemistry on the blind date.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Sokkotreffeillä meillä ei ollut kemiaa.
olla
to be
me
we
ei
no / not (negative verb)
sokkotreffit
blind date
Questions & Answers about Sokkotreffeillä meillä ei ollut kemiaa.
Why is sokkotreffeillä in the plural adessive (-llä) case?
The base word for "date" is treffit, which is a plural-only word in Finnish (like häät for a wedding). To say "on a date", you use the plural adessive ending -llä, giving us treffeillä. The prefix sokko- simply means "blind".
Why is the verb ei ollut singular when the subject is "we"?
This is the standard Finnish "to have" construction. Instead of a direct translation for "we didn't have", Finnish says "at us was not" (meillä ei ollut). In this structure, the verb olla is always in the third-person singular, regardless of who the possessor is.
Why is kemia in the partitive form (kemiaa)?
In negative "to have" sentences, the thing you do not have must always be in the partitive case. Additionally, "chemistry" in this romantic sense is an abstract, uncountable concept, which inherently requires the partitive.
How would I use the lesson's topic, ei kumpikaan, if I wanted to say "neither of us felt the chemistry"?
Our sentence uses meillä to treat the pair as a single unit that lacks chemistry. To use kumpikaan (neither), you would shift focus to the individuals and use a verb like tuntea (to feel): Kumpikaan meistä ei tuntenut kemiaa.