Breakdown of Minulla on yksi suosikki-kanava, jolla on paljon suomenkielisiä ohjevideoita.
Questions & Answers about Minulla on yksi suosikki-kanava, jolla on paljon suomenkielisiä ohjevideoita.
Finnish doesn’t usually use a direct equivalent of English “have” for possession.
Instead, it uses an existential construction:
- [someone in adessive] + on + [thing]
Literally: “on me is [thing]” → “I have [thing]”
So:
- Minulla on yksi suosikki-kanava
literally: “On me is one favourite channel” → “I have one favourite channel.”
If you said Minä olen yksi suosikki-kanava, it would mean “I am one favourite channel,” which is completely different and wrong here.
Minulla is adessive singular of minä (“I”).
- minä → “I”
- minulla → “on/at me” (adessive)
The adessive -lla/-llä often means:
- physical location: pöydällä = “on the table”
- “at someone’s place”: Liisalla = “at Liisa’s (place)”
- possessor: Minulla on kirja = “I have a book” (lit. “on me is a book”)
So in possession sentences, the owner is put in adessive (-lla) and the verb olla (“to be”) is used:
Minulla on X = “I have X.”
Yksi literally means “one”, but in spoken/written Finnish it can also work a bit like “one / a certain” in English.
Minulla on suosikkikanava.
→ “I have a favourite channel.” (neutral, just states that you have one)Minulla on yksi suosikkikanava.
→ “I have one favourite channel.”
This often suggests:- you want to highlight that it’s one specific channel, or
- you might have others, but you’re now talking about one of them in particular.
So yksi adds focus: “one (particular) favourite channel” rather than simply “a favourite channel.”
Grammatically, suosikki + kanava is a compound noun meaning “favourite channel.”
The most standard modern spelling is:
- suosikkikanava (one word, no hyphen)
The hyphen in suosikki-kanava is not strictly necessary here; it’s often used:
- to improve readability in long or complex compounds, or
- in more informal writing, even where the one-word form would be fine.
Writing it as two separate words without a hyphen (suosikki kanava) is usually not correct, because:
- suosikki is itself a noun (“a favourite”), not an adjective.
To make a proper noun–noun compound in Finnish, you normally write it as one word (or sometimes hyphenated), not as two separate words.
So the “most textbook-like” version would be suosikkikanava, but suosikki-kanava is still understandable and common in casual writing.
Jolla is a relative pronoun, corresponding roughly to English “which / that” in this sentence.
Its base form is joka (“which, that, who”), and it inflects for case like a regular pronoun:
- nominative: joka
- genitive: jonka
- partitive: jota
- inessive: jossa (“in which”)
- adessive: jolla (“on/at which”)
- etc.
Here, jolla is adessive (same -lla ending) and it stands for kanavalla:
- (Tällä) kanavalla on paljon suomenkielisiä ohjevideoita.
“(This) channel has a lot of Finnish-language tutorial videos.” - ...yksi suosikkikanava, jolla on paljon suomenkielisiä ohjevideoita.
“…one favourite channel, which has a lot of Finnish-language tutorial videos.”
So jolla = “on which / which has,” referring back to suosikki-kanava.
There are a few slightly different options, each with its nuance:
jolla on
- Mirrors the ordinary possession structure: kanavalla on paljon videoita
- Emphasises the channel as the possessor of the videos.
- Relative version: suosikkikanava, jolla on paljon videoita
“a favourite channel which has a lot of videos.”
jossa on
- Based on the idea “in which there are many videos”.
- Emphasises the location: videos exist in that channel/place.
- suosikkikanava, jossa on paljon videoita is also possible and idiomatic.
missä on
- missä is usually an interrogative adverb (“where?”), but in colloquial Finnish people also use it as a relative (“where, in which”).
- More spoken/colloquial: kanava, missä on paljon videoita.
In the original sentence, jolla on is very natural because it directly reflects the idea “the channel has many videos” (kanavalla on paljon videoita).
The key word is paljon (“a lot of, much, many”).
In Finnish, quantifiers like paljon usually require the partitive:
- paljon vettä – a lot of water (partitive singular)
- paljon kirjoja – a lot of books (partitive plural)
Here we have countable plural items (tutorial videos), so we use partitive plural:
- ohjevideoita = partitive plural of ohjevideo (“tutorial video”)
Adjectives must agree with the noun in number and case, so:
- nominative plural: suomenkieliset ohjevideot (“the Finnish-language tutorial videos”)
- partitive plural: suomenkielisiä ohjevideoita (“(a lot of) Finnish-language tutorial videos”)
Because paljon is present, we get the partitive plural pair:
paljon suomenkielisiä ohjevideoita.
Suomenkielisiä comes from the adjective suomenkielinen, which literally means “Finnish-language” or “Finnish-speaking.”
Formation (simplified):
- Suomi – the language “Finnish”
- Suomen kieli – “the Finnish language” (genitive + noun)
- This phrase fuses into one adjective: suomenkielinen (“Finnish-language”)
- Partitive plural of suomenkielinen → suomenkielisiä
So:
- base adjective: suomenkielinen video – “a Finnish-language video”
- partitive plural: suomenkielisiä videoita – “Finnish-language videos (as an indefinite quantity)”
Why not:
- suominkielisiä – incorrect; we don’t form it directly from Suomi
- -nkielinen. The “n” comes from the genitive Suomen.
- suomenkielen ohjevideoita – that would literally be “tutorial videos of the Finnish language,” using a genitive + noun construction.
It’s grammatical but not the normal way to say “Finnish-language tutorial videos” as an adjective phrase. Suomenkielisiä ohjevideoita is the standard attributive expression.
Yes, you can change the word order in Finnish to change emphasis.
Minulla on yksi suosikkikanava, jolla on paljon suomenkielisiä ohjevideoita.
Neutral, the most natural default.Yksi suosikkikanava minulla on, jolla on paljon suomenkielisiä ohjevideoita.
Possible, but more marked.
It tends to emphasise “one favourite channel I (do) have…”, often in contrast with something else you don’t have or as a rhetorical start.
In general:
- Putting Minulla on first is the normal way to introduce what you have.
- Moving yksi suosikkikanava to the front makes that phrase more contrastive / focused.
So the core meaning stays the same, but the information structure and emphasis shift.
The part starting with jolla is a relative clause (a subordinate clause giving more information about the channel).
Finnish usually separates a main clause and a following relative clause with a comma, especially when the relative clause is giving additional (non-essential) information:
- Minulla on yksi suosikkikanava, jolla on paljon suomenkielisiä ohjevideoita.
“I have one favourite channel, which has a lot of Finnish-language tutorial videos.”
The comma here signals that the “jolla on…” part is extra information about the channel you just mentioned.
In some contexts, especially with more restrictive relative clauses, Finnish writers may omit the comma:
- Se kanava jolla on paljon videoita – “the channel that has a lot of videos”
But in a full sentence like yours, writing the comma is very common and stylistically natural.