Breakdown of Emme pääse sisälle, koska lukko on rikki.
Questions & Answers about Emme pääse sisälle, koska lukko on rikki.
Emme pääse is made of:
- emme = the negative verb for we (1st person plural)
- pääse = the main verb päästä (“to get (to), to reach, to be able to get in”) in its special negative form (called the connegative).
Literally it is “we-not get (to)”, which in natural English is “we can’t get (in)” or “we don’t get (in)”.
Finnish uses a separate negative verb (en, et, ei, emme, ette, eivät) and the main verb loses the personal ending in negative sentences. So:
- pääsemme = we get (positive)
- emme pääse = we don’t get / we can’t get
In Finnish negative sentences, the personal ending moves to the negative verb, so the main verb goes into a special base form with no personal ending:
- Positive: me pääsemme = we get / we are able to get
- Negative: me emme pääse = we do not get / we are not able to get
So you never say emme pääsemme; that would be incorrect. The pattern is:
- emme + pääse
- ei + pääse
- ette + pääse, etc.
Päästä usually focuses on possibility / ability to get somewhere (physically or otherwise), so emme pääse sisälle is mainly:
- “We can’t get inside / We’re unable to get inside.”
The reason is given: koska lukko on rikki (“because the lock is broken”), so it’s clearly about physical impossibility, not permission.
For “we are not allowed to get in”, you would more often see something like:
- Emme saa mennä sisälle. = We are not allowed to go in.
Both sisälle and sisään can mean “inside / in(doors)” as a direction (movement into something):
- emme pääse sisälle
- emme pääse sisään
Both are correct here and very common.
Nuance:
- sisään is a more general, very common form for “in(wards)”.
- sisälle is the illative form (the “into” case) from sisä (“inside”), literally “to the inside”.
In many everyday contexts, they are interchangeable when you talk about going in somewhere.
Sisälle is the illative case, which expresses movement into something (“to / into / inside”).
Typical illative endings are -Vn, -seen, -lle, depending on the word. With sisä, the form is sisälle. It answers the question:
- Minne? = To where?
So:
- emme pääse sisälle = we can’t get in / inside (to the inside of the place).
In Finnish, it is standard to put a comma between two clauses, even if the second one starts with koska (“because”):
- Emme pääse sisälle, koska lukko on rikki.
Each of these is a clause:
- Emme pääse sisälle.
- Lukko on rikki.
When they’re joined with koska, Finnish writing rules say you use a comma between the main clause and the subordinate clause. So the comma is required here in standard written Finnish.
Yes, that is perfectly correct:
- Koska lukko on rikki, emme pääse sisälle.
Meaning is the same: “Because the lock is broken, we can’t get inside.”
The difference is mostly information flow / emphasis:
Emme pääse sisälle, koska lukko on rikki.
→ focus starts with the fact that you can’t get in.Koska lukko on rikki, emme pääse sisälle.
→ focus starts with the reason; you first explain why, then what the result is.
Both orders are natural.
Both are possible, but they feel slightly different:
- päästä = to manage to get (to) a place, to gain access, to succeed in getting in.
- mennä = to go (neutral, simple movement).
So:
Emme pääse sisälle.
→ We can’t get in / can’t gain access (something prevents us).Emme voi mennä sisälle.
→ We can’t go inside (could be physical, social, or permission-related; it’s more neutral).
In the context of a broken lock, päästä is especially natural, because the idea is that access is blocked.
Lukko means “lock” (like a door lock, padlock, etc.).
It shows consonant gradation:
- Strong grade: lukko (double k) – nominative singular
- Weak grade: lukon (single k) – genitive singular
In this sentence it is in the basic nominative form lukko, because it’s the subject of the verb on (“is”):
- lukko on rikki = the lock is broken
Both are correct, but with slightly different feel:
lukko on rikki
→ very common, everyday way to say “the lock is broken / not working”.
Rikki is an indeclinable word used as a predicative: it describes a broken state.lukko on rikkinäinen
→ a bit more descriptive: “the lock is broken / faulty / damaged (as an adjective)”.
Rikkinäinen is a regular adjective and can be inflected.
In most casual contexts you would say lukko on rikki. It’s shorter and very idiomatic.
Emme pääse is in the present tense.
However, Finnish present tense can cover:
- present time: “we can’t get in (right now)”
- near future: “we won’t be able to get in / we’re not going to get in”
The exact interpretation comes from context. With koska lukko on rikki, it naturally means something like:
- “We can’t get inside (now / at this moment) because the lock is broken.”
But in many contexts it can imply “we won’t be able to get in (at all)” if nothing changes.
Emme always marks 1st person plural negative, but the tense comes from the form of the main verb.
Examples:
Emme pääse sisälle.
→ Present: We don’t / can’t get inside.Emme päässeet sisälle.
→ Past (with past participle): We didn’t / couldn’t get inside.Emme ole päässeet sisälle.
→ Perfect: We have not managed to get inside.
So emme itself is not “present tense”; it just says who is negated. The time reference is shown by the main verb and any auxiliaries.
In Finnish you must include the verb olla (“to be”) in such sentences:
- lukko on rikki = the lock is broken
Leaving out on (→ lukko rikki) would sound ungrammatical in standard Finnish. Finnish doesn’t drop the verb “to be” the way English sometimes does in informal speech.