Breakdown of Tammikuusta lähtien seuranta on ollut helppoa, kun minä kirjaan kaiken ylös.
olla
to be
minä
I
helppo
easy
tammikuu
January
Questions & Answers about Tammikuusta lähtien seuranta on ollut helppoa, kun minä kirjaan kaiken ylös.
Why does Tammikuusta have the -sta ending before lähtien?
The word lähtien ("since" or "starting from") is a postposition that always requires the word before it to be in the elative case (-sta/-stä). It marks the exact starting point of a continuous time or place. You could also use the postposition pitäen in exactly the same way here: Tammikuusta pitäen.
Why is the adjective helppoa in the partitive case rather than the nominative helppo?
In Finnish, when the subject of a sentence is an abstract concept or an activity, the describing adjective (the predicative) takes the partitive case. Here, seuranta (tracking/monitoring) is an abstract activity. If the subject were a specific, countable noun, you would use the nominative (for example, tehtävä on helppo - "the task is easy").
Ylös usually means "up." Why is it translated as "down" in the English sentence?
It belongs to the phrasal verb kirjata ylös, which means "to make a note of", "to write down", or "to log". This is just a difference in idiom: where an English speaker writes something "down", a Finnish speaker literally writes it "up"!
Why is kaiken ("everything") not in the partitive case?