Breakdown of Hän vastasi kommenttiin nopeasti ja antoi toisen tykkäyksen.
Questions & Answers about Hän vastasi kommenttiin nopeasti ja antoi toisen tykkäyksen.
Hän is gender‑neutral and can mean either he or she. Finnish does not grammatically mark gender in third‑person singular pronouns.
If you really need to specify gender, you normally do it with context (e.g. by naming the person) rather than with a different pronoun. So this sentence could equally well be about a man or a woman.
Vastasi is the past tense (imperfect) form of the verb vastata (to answer, to reply) in the 3rd person singular.
- hän vastaa = he/she answers / is answering (present)
- hän vastasi = he/she answered / replied (past)
The verb vastata is a type 4 verb. In the past tense, type 4 verbs usually add -si- before the personal ending:
- vastata → stem: vasta- → hän vastasi
Kommenttiin is in the illative case (often “into / to” something). The basic form is kommentti (comment).
The illative singular often has the ending -Vn (vowel + n), and here it surfaces as -iin:
- kommentti → kommenttiin (into/to the comment).
The verb vastata behaves like this:
- vastata johonkin = to answer / reply to something → the something is in the illative.
So you answer kommenttiin, kysymykseen (to a question), viestiin (to a message), etc.
Yes, both are correct:
- Hän vastasi kommenttiin nopeasti…
- Hän vastasi nopeasti kommenttiin…
The basic meaning is the same. Finnish word order is quite flexible. Very roughly:
- Placing nopeasti earlier (vastasi nopeasti kommenttiin) can make the manner (quickly) a bit more prominent.
- Placing kommenttiin right after the verb (vastasi kommenttiin nopeasti) can keep the verb + its “object” (here, the illative complement) together as a unit.
In everyday speech and writing they are both natural; the difference is subtle.
- nopea is an adjective = fast, quick
- nopea vastaus = a quick answer
- nopeasti is an adverb = quickly, fast
- hän vastasi nopeasti = he/she answered quickly
In this sentence we need an adverb to describe how the action was done, so nopeasti is used.
Finnish often drops the subject pronoun when it’s clear from context and verb endings. After Hän vastasi…, it’s obvious that the same person continues doing the next action.
So:
- Hän vastasi kommenttiin nopeasti ja antoi toisen tykkäyksen.
literally: He/She answered the comment quickly and gave a second like.
Adding hän again (…ja hän antoi…) is still grammatically correct, but feels more emphatic or slightly heavier in style. In neutral, flowing Finnish, you usually omit the repeated hän.
Modern Finnish has both:
- tykätä (verb) = to like (in social media, to click Like)
- hän tykkäsi kommentista = he/she liked the comment
- tykkäys (noun) = a like (one like as a countable thing)
- antaa tykkäyksen = to give a like
In social media contexts, antaa tykkäyksen emphasizes the act of giving one like as a unit.
Toisen tykkäyksen suggests that this is an additional like: a second one. Using the verb tykätä alone would not express as clearly that it’s specifically the second like, unless you add something like uudestaan (again) or toisen kerran (for the second time).
Toinen is the ordinal “second”, but it also often means “another” in everyday speech.
In this sentence toisen tykkäyksen can be understood as:
- a second like (literally the second one in sequence), or
- another like (an additional like compared to the previous ones).
In many contexts these meanings overlap, so toisen tykkäyksen smoothly conveys an additional, second like.
Tykkäyksen is the genitive singular of tykkäys. In this sentence, it functions as a total object of the verb antaa (to give).
Finnish total objects in the singular usually look like the genitive (-n):
- basic form: tykkäys
- total object: tykkäyksen (a whole like, one complete like)
The idea is that the action antaa is completed and affects the entire object: one definite like is given.
No, that would be ungrammatical/unnatural here.
- Tykkäyksen (genitive/total object) = one whole like is given.
- Tykkäystä (partitive) would suggest “some amount of a like”, which doesn’t make sense with a countable item like a social‑media like in this context.
With antaa + a clearly countable thing (like postikortin, lahjan, tykkäyksen), you normally use the total object in the genitive/accusative form, not the partitive.
A couple of natural alternatives are:
Hän vastasi kommenttiin nopeasti ja tykkäsi siitä uudelleen.
- He/She replied to the comment quickly and liked it again.
Hän vastasi kommenttiin nopeasti ja tykkäsi siitä toisen kerran.
- He/She replied to the comment quickly and liked it for the second time.
Here tykkäsi siitä (liked it) uses the verb tykätä with siitä (elative case, “of it / about it”), and uudelleen or toisen kerran conveys the idea of doing it again / a second time.