Hän kiitti lääkäriä.

• Hän = he or she
• kiitti = thanked
• lääkäriä = doctor in the partitive singular

So the structure is basically:

subject + verb + object

A more grammatical gloss would be:

Hän = subject
kiitti = past-tense verb
lääkäriä = object of the verb

It can mean either he or she. Standard Finnish does not normally distinguish gender in third-person singular pronouns the way English does.

So:

• Hän kiitti lääkäriä can mean He thanked the doctor
• or She thanked the doctor

You only know which one is meant from context.

Kiitti is the past tense form of kiittää, which means to thank.

• hän kiittää = he/she thanks or is thanking
• hän kiitti = he/she thanked

More specifically, this is the 3rd person singular past form.

Yes.

• kiittää = to thank
• kiitti in this sentence = thanked (past tense of the verb)
• kiitos = thanks / thank you

There is also an informal spoken kiitti! meaning thanks!, but in Hän kiitti lääkäriä, kiitti is clearly a verb form because it has an object after it.

Because the verb kiittää normally takes its object in the partitive case.

So the pattern is:

• kiittää jotakuta = to thank someone

That is why you say:

• Hän kiitti lääkäriä not
• Hän kiitti lääkäri

This is mainly a matter of verb government: certain Finnish verbs require a specific case with their objects.

No. That would be a very natural question for a learner, but here the answer is no.

In this sentence, the partitive is used because kiittää is a verb that takes a partitive object. It does not mean that only part of the doctor was involved.

So lääkäriä still just means the doctor / a doctor as the person being thanked.

It is singular.

• lääkäri = doctor
• lääkäriä = doctor, in the partitive singular

If it were plural, it would look different, for example:

• lääkäreitä or lääkärejä = doctors, in the partitive plural

So:

• Hän kiitti lääkäriä = He/she thanked the doctor
• Hän kiitti lääkäreitä = He/she thanked the doctors

Finnish does not have articles like English a and the.

So lääkäriä by itself does not explicitly say a doctor or the doctor. Context decides that.

Depending on the situation, the sentence could be understood as:

• He/she thanked the doctor
• He/she thanked a doctor

In many contexts, English naturally uses the doctor because a specific doctor is already known.

Yes. Finnish word order is more flexible than English word order because the case endings help show the grammatical roles.

The most neutral order here is:

• Hän kiitti lääkäriä

But you could also hear other orders for emphasis, such as:

• Lääkäriä hän kiitti = emphasizing the doctor
• Kiitti hän lääkäriä = possible in special contexts, but less neutral

For a beginner, Hän kiitti lääkäriä is the normal pattern to learn first.

Roughly:

hän KIIT-ti LÄÄ-kä-ri-ä

A few useful points:

• Stress in Finnish is normally on the first syllable of each word.
• ii in kiitti is a long vowel, like a long ee
• tt is a long consonant: hold it a little longer than a single t
• ää in lääkäriä is also long
• ä is a front vowel, somewhat like the vowel in English cat, though not exactly the same

So the length of sounds matters:

• kiiti and kiitti would sound different
• läkäriä and lääkäriä would sound different

The dictionary form is lääkäri, meaning doctor.

In the sentence, it appears as lääkäriä because it is in the partitive singular.

So when looking words up, you would search for:

• lääkäri
• kiittää
• hän