Questions & Answers about Minä juon vähän vettä.
Vettä is the partitive singular form of vesi (water).
Finnish often uses the partitive case for:
- Uncountable substances: water, milk, coffee, etc.
- An indefinite amount of something: some water, a little water.
After juoda (to drink), you almost always use the partitive to mean you drink some of a liquid:
- Minä juon vettä. = I drink (some) water.
- Minä juon vähän vettä. = I drink a little (bit of) water.
So vettä tells us we are talking about an unspecified amount of water, not a specific, clearly delimited quantity.
Vähän is an adverb meaning a little, a bit, or not much. It modifies the verb phrase and tells us how much the speaker drinks.
- Minä juon vettä. = I drink water.
- Minä juon vähän vettä. = I drink a little water / I drink some water (a small amount).
Note that vähän itself is not inflected here; it stays the same. The case marking (partitive) appears on vettä, the noun for water.
You can normally omit the pronoun in Finnish, because the verb ending shows the person:
- Minä juon vähän vettä.
- Juon vähän vettä.
Both mean I drink a little water.
The -n ending on juon already tells us it is 1st person singular (I). You usually include Minä only for:
- emphasis: Minä juon vähän vettä (but the others drink a lot).
- clarity in complex contexts.
- very formal or careful speech or writing.
In everyday speech, Juon vähän vettä is very natural.
The infinitive (dictionary form) is juoda (to drink).
Juon is present tense, 1st person singular of juoda. Very simplified:
- juoda (to drink)
- minä juon – I drink
- sinä juot – you drink (sg.)
- hän juo – he/she drinks
- me juomme – we drink
- te juotte – you drink (pl.)
- he juovat – they drink
So, juon comes from the verb juoda by adding person and tense endings.
Juon is present tense. Finnish has only one present tense form for both:
- I drink (habitually, in general)
- I am drinking (right now)
Context decides which English version is more natural. So Minä juon vähän vettä can be:
- I drink a little water. (e.g. every day)
- I am drinking a little water. (right now)
The -n ending marks 1st person singular (I) in the present tense for most verbs.
For example:
- minä juon – I drink
- minä syön – I eat
- minä luen – I read
- minä menen – I go
So when you see a present-tense verb form ending with -n, it usually means I am doing the action.
Yes, Finnish allows flexible word order, but the neutral and most natural version here is:
- Minä juon vähän vettä.
- or simply Juon vähän vettä.
Other orders are possible but they change emphasis and can sound marked or odd in isolation:
- Vähän vettä juon. – Emphasis on a little water (maybe contrasting with something else).
- Vettä juon vähän. – Emphasis that the amount of water is small (sounds like “As for water, I drink only a little.”).
- Vähän minä juon vettä. – Strong emphasis on how little I drink, somewhat dramatic or contrastive.
For normal, context-free practice, stick to (Minä) juon vähän vettä.
Vettä is singular, but in the partitive case.
The base form is:
- vesi – nominative singular (water)
The relevant forms here are:
- vesi – water (subject form)
- vettä – some water, water (as substance, partitive singular)
Finnish usually expresses “some of a substance” with the partitive singular, not with a plural form.
To talk about a specific, definite amount of water, you would avoid the partitive and use a different structure, often with a possessive or determiner. For example:
- Juon veden. – I drink the water / I drink up the water (a complete, specific amount).
- Here veden is genitive singular of vesi.
However, Juon veden often implies finishing all of that water, not just drinking it in general. Unlike English, Finnish does not have articles (the, a), so definiteness is often expressed by:
- context
- case choice (genitive vs partitive)
- possessives
For a simple general statement, Juon vettä is the usual I drink water / I am drinking water.
This is due to a common pattern in Finnish noun inflection where the stem changes:
- vesi (nominative)
- vettä (partitive)
Internally, the stem behaves like vet- and then you add the partitive ending -tä. The s of vesi alternates with t in many forms:
- vesi – water (nom.)
- vettä – (some) water (part.)
- veden – of the water / the water’s (gen.)
- vessejä (colloquial/plural variations exist, but not needed here)
This kind of consonant change is part of Finnish consonant gradation and irregular stems. You mostly learn them word by word.
The Finnish ä is a front vowel, similar to:
- the a in English cat or hat, but usually a bit purer and shorter.
So:
- minä ≈ mi-nä (both vowels short)
- vähän ≈ va-han (with that same a as in cat, but fronted)
- vettä ≈ vet-tä, with a short ä.
Also note that Finnish has short and long vowels. Here ä is short in all three words (only one ä written).
In this sentence, vähän is functioning as an adverb of quantity, modifying the drinking action: drink a little.
It does not directly modify vettä* as an adjective would. If you wanted an adjective, you would typically use vähäinen (small, slight) and inflect it to match the noun, but that is relatively formal and not how you would usually say a little water in everyday speech.
For everyday expressions of quantity like a little, much, a lot, Finnish commonly uses:
- vähän – a little
- paljon – a lot, much
combined with the partitive form of the noun:
- vähän vettä – a little water
- paljon vettä – a lot of water
Yes. Mä is the colloquial / spoken form of minä used widely in everyday Finnish.
So:
- Mä juon vähän vettä. – very natural in casual speech.
- Minä juon vähän vettä. – neutral, written, or careful speech.
In spoken Finnish, you will hear mä juon much more often than minä juon.