Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, minua väsyttää.

If the call goes on too long, I get tired.

Breakdown of Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, minua väsyttää.

• jos: if
• liian: too
• pitkä: long
• minua: me
• väsyttää: to feel tired
• puhelu: the call
• jatkua: to go on

Questions & Answers about Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, minua väsyttää.

Why is it minua väsyttää and not olen väsynyt?

Both can translate as “I’m tired”, but they’re different structures and feel slightly different in Finnish.

• Minua väsyttää literally: “[Something] tires me / makes me feel tired.”

  • It describes the feeling coming over you right now or as a reaction to something.
  • It’s more like “I’m getting tired / I feel tired”, often with a cause implied (here: the long phone call).

• Olen väsynyt literally: “I am tired.”

  • It just states your state: you are tired, without focusing on what causes it.

In this sentence, minua väsyttää fits well because the too-long phone call causes the tiredness. It’s a typical pattern with verbs of feeling:

• Minua väsyttää – I (start to) feel tired
• Minua ärsyttää – I am annoyed / something annoys me
• Minua pelottaa – I am scared / something scares me

Why is it minua and not minä or minut in minua väsyttää?

Minua is the partitive form of minä.

The pattern with verbs like väsyttää, pelottaa, janottaa, oksettaa etc. is:

partitive experiencer + 3rd person singular verb
minua väsyttää – I’m tired / I feel tired
sinua janottaa – you are thirsty
häntä pelottaa – he/she is scared

Why partitive?
The partitive here marks the person who experiences the feeling. It’s a very common, almost idiomatic structure in Finnish grammar. You don’t say *minä väsyttää or *minut väsyttää.

• minä = nominative (subject form) – not used here
• minut = accusative (direct object, whole affected entity) – not used here
• minua = partitive (partial, ongoing, affected; used for experiencer) – this is the correct one

So you should memorize the pattern “Minua väsyttää” as a fixed type of construction: experiencer in partitive, verb in 3rd person.

Why does the verb stay in 3rd person (väsyttää) instead of agreeing with minä?

In minua väsyttää, minua is not a grammatical subject. The construction is impersonal:

• There is no normal personal subject like minä or puhelu controlling the verb.
• The verb väsyttää stays in 3rd person singular regardless of who is tired:
  • Minua väsyttää. – I’m tired.
  • Sinua väsyttää. – You’re tired.
  • Heitä väsyttää. – They’re tired.

So you never conjugate it as *minä väsyttän, *sinä väsyttät etc.
Think of väsyttää here as something like “it tires (me)” in English: the verb looks like 3rd person singular, and the person who feels it is marked separately (minua).

What’s the difference between väsyttää and väsyä?

Both relate to tiredness, but they’re different kinds of verbs.

• väsyttää = “to tire (someone), to make (someone) feel tired”

  • Usually used in the impersonal experiencer pattern:
    
    • Minua väsyttää. – I feel tired / I’m getting tired.
    • Pitkä päivä väsyttää minua. – A long day tires me.

• väsyä = “to get tired, to become tired” (intransitive, about the person themselves)

  • Conjugated normally:
    • Minä väsyn helposti. – I get tired easily.
    • Hän väsyi nopeasti. – He/She got tired quickly.

In your sentence, the focus is on the feeling caused by the long call, so minua väsyttää is natural. You could say väsyisin or väsyn in some contexts, but the nuance and structure would change.

Why is it puhelu jatkuu and not puhelu jatkaa?

This is about the difference between jatkua and jatkaa:

• jatkua = “to continue” (intransitive, no direct object)

  • Something continues by itself:
    
    • Puhelu jatkuu. – The call continues.
    • Kurssi jatkuu ensi viikolla. – The course continues next week.

• jatkaa = “to continue (something)” (transitive, takes an object)

  • Someone continues something:
    
    • Jatkamme puhelua myöhemmin. – We will continue the call later.
    • Hän jatkoi puhumista. – He/She continued talking.

In your sentence, the call is just happening and continuing by itself, so the intransitive jatkua is correct:
Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään… – If the call goes on for too long…

Why is it jatkuu (present tense) when the sentence talks about a possible future situation?

Finnish normally doesn’t have a separate future tense. The present tense is used for:

• present time: Puhelu jatkuu. – The call is continuing.
• near future: Puhelu jatkuu huomenna. – The call continues tomorrow.
• hypothetical future with “jos”:
  
  • Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, minua väsyttää.
    = If the call goes on for too long, I (will) get tired.

The “future” meaning comes from the context and from jos (“if”), not from the verb form. You don’t need a form like *jatkuisi here; that would sound more like a “would continue” type of sentence and is not needed in this basic conditional clause.

Why is it jos here and not kun?

Both jos and kun can be translated as “if/when”, but they’re different:

• jos = if (uncertain condition, it may or may not happen)

  • Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, minua väsyttää.
    → It’s possible that the call continues too long; if that happens, I get tired.

• kun = “when” (something is expected or definite)

  • Kun puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, minua väsyttää.
    → Whenever the call (as it usually does) goes on too long, I get tired. It’s treated more like a regular or expected event.

In this sentence, jos is natural because it states a condition: if this happens, then that happens.

Why is it liian pitkään and not liian pitkä or liian kauan?

All of these look similar but they’re used differently:

1. liian pitkään

   • pitkään is an adverb formed from the adjective pitkä (“long”).
   • It answers “how long (in time)?”
   • Puhelu jatkuu pitkään. – The call goes on for a long time.
   • liian pitkään = for too long (in duration)

2. liian pitkä

   • pitkä is an adjective describing a noun:
   • liian pitkä puhelu – a call that is too long
   • You would use this before a noun, not as an adverbial of time:
     • Puhelu on liian pitkä. – The call is too long (as a quality).

3. liian kauan

   • kauan is another adverb meaning “for a long time”.
   • Puhelu jatkuu liian kauan. – The call lasts too long.
   • This is very close in meaning to liian pitkään. Both are correct here; liian kauan maybe focuses a bit more directly on length of time, but in everyday speech they’re almost interchangeable.

So in your sentence, liian pitkään works because you need an adverb of duration, not an adjective.

Why is puhelu in the basic form (nominative) and not puhelun or something else?

Puhelu is the subject of the verb jatkuu:

• Puhelu (nominative singular) = the call
• jatkuu = continues

In a normal Finnish sentence, the subject is in nominative:

• Auto liikkuu. – The car moves.
• Kurssi alkaa. – The course begins.
• Puhelu jatkuu. – The call continues.

Puhelun is the genitive form (of the call), which you’d use in a different structure:

• Puhelun jatkuminen väsyttää minua. – The continuation of the call tires me.

But in your sentence, the simple subject–verb structure uses nominative: puhelu jatkuu.

Can I change the word order to “Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, väsyttää minua”?

Grammatically it’s possible, but it’s not the most natural word order in everyday speech.

• Minua väsyttää is the neutral, common order.
• Väsyttää minua sounds marked, a bit heavier or more poetic/emphatic. It might appear in literary texts or in speech when stressing the verb.

So these are possible but differ in feel:

• Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, minua väsyttää. – Natural, neutral.
• Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, väsyttää minua. – Understandable, but sounds stylistic or odd in casual speech.

For normal spoken and written Finnish, stick to “minua väsyttää” after the comma.

How would I say “If the call goes on for too long, we get tired”?

You keep the same structure and just change the experiencer:

• Minua väsyttää. – I’m tired.
• Sinua väsyttää. – You’re tired.
• Meitä väsyttää. – We’re tired.

So the sentence becomes:

Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, meitä väsyttää.

The verb väsyttää stays in 3rd person singular, and the pronoun meitä is the partitive plural of me (“we”).

Why is there a comma before minua väsyttää?

In Finnish punctuation, a subordinate clause (here, the jos-clause) is normally separated from the main clause by a comma, especially when it comes first:

• Jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään, minua väsyttää.
  – subordinate clause first, comma, then main clause.

If you reverse the order, it looks like this:

• Minua väsyttää, jos puhelu jatkuu liian pitkään.

In practice, the comma is usually kept in both orders when jos is involved, because it clearly separates the condition from the result.