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Questions & Answers about Hän odottaa meitä puistossa.
What does Hän mean here? Is it “he” or “she”?
In Finnish hän is a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun. It can mean he or she – you can’t tell the gender from the word itself.
Why is meitä used instead of me?
Meitä is the partitive form of me (“we/us”). Many verbs that describe an ongoing or incomplete action, like odottaa (“to wait for”), require their object in the partitive case. So “waiting for us” becomes odottaa meitä.
What does the -ssa ending in puistossa indicate?
The suffix -ssa marks the inessive case, which corresponds to the English preposition in. So puistossa literally means in the park.
Why is there no article (“the”/“a”) before puistossa?
Finnish does not have articles. Definiteness or indefiniteness is understood from context, not from separate words like the or a.
Does Hän odottaa meitä puistossa mean “He will wait for us in the park” or “He is waiting for us in the park”?
The Finnish present tense can express both the English present continuous (“is waiting”) and a simple future (“will wait”) depending on context. Here it most naturally means “He/she is waiting for us in the park.”
How would you form the negative of this sentence?
Use the negative auxiliary ei and put the main verb in its connegative form:
Hän ei odota meitä puistossa.
= “He/she is not waiting for us in the park.”
Can I change the word order? For example, can I say Puistossa hän odottaa meitä?
Yes! Finnish has relatively free word order. Moving Puistossa to the front adds emphasis on the location:
Puistossa hän odottaa meitä.
(“In the park, he/she is waiting for us.”)
How is odottaa pronounced and broken down into syllables?
It’s pronounced [oh-dot-tah-a]. Syllable division: o-dot-toa. Note the double t and double o – they each count as separate sounds in Finnish.