Learn Hardcore Finnish: Hän syytti minua myöhästymisestä, vaikka bussi oli oikeasti rikki. - She/He blamed me for being late, although the bus was actually broken.

In English we say “accused me *of being late”.
In Finnish that “being late” is turned into a noun (*myöhästyminen), and then put into the elative (myöhästymisestä), because syyttää requires that case.

Why does myöhästymisestä end with -stä? What does that case mean here?

-stä / -sta is the elative case, usually meaning “out of / from / about / for”.

With syyttää, the standard pattern is:

syyttää + partitive (person) + elative (thing)
= to accuse someone of something

So:

Hän syytti minua myöhästymisestä.
= He/She accused me *of (my) lateness.*

The elative here is not physical “out of a place”, but “from/about a cause or reason”, which is why it matches English “of” in this expression.

Could it also be minun myöhästymisestäni? If yes, what’s the difference?

Yes, you can say:

Hän syytti minua minun myöhästymisestäni.

Here:

minun = my (genitive of minä)
myöhästymisestäni = myöhästymisestä + possessive suffix -ni (of my lateness)

Meaning-wise it’s basically:

He/She accused me of *my being late.*

The simple myöhästymisestä already implies that it was my lateness (because the person accused is minua), so adding minun … -ni is more explicit or emphatic, and often unnecessary in everyday speech unless you want to stress that the lateness was specifically mine.

What does vaikka do here? Is it like “even though” or “because”?

In this sentence vaikka means “although / even though”, not “because”.

Hän syytti minua myöhästymisestä, vaikka bussi oli oikeasti rikki.
= He/She accused me of being late, *although the bus was actually broken.*

So vaikka introduces a concessive clause: something that is true but goes against what you’d expect from the main clause.

Why is there a comma before vaikka?

In Finnish, subordinate clauses (like vaikka bussi oli oikeasti rikki) are usually separated from the main clause with a comma.

Pattern:

Main clause , vaikka + subordinate clause

So:

Hän syytti minua myöhästymisestä, vaikka bussi oli oikeasti rikki.

The comma is standard punctuation: it marks the boundary between the main clause and the vaikka-clause.

Could I use mutta instead of vaikka? What would change?

You could say:

Hän syytti minua myöhästymisestä, mutta bussi oli oikeasti rikki.

Difference:

vaikka = although/even though → subordinate clause, stronger sense of contradiction between the two facts.
mutta = but → simple contrast between two separate statements.

Both are grammatical, but:

vaikka highlights the “unfairness” or unexpected nature of the accusation more strongly.
mutta just adds a contrasting second fact without that concessive nuance.

What does oikeasti mean here, and how is it different from todella or ihan?

oikeasti literally means “in reality, actually, really (truly)”.

In this sentence:

bussi oli oikeasti rikki
= the bus was *actually broken* (contrary to what someone might think or claim)

Nuances:

oikeasti – “in reality / actually”, often correcting or emphasizing the truth of a situation.
todella – “really / very”, more about intensity (like “very broken”, “really broken”).
ihan oikeasti – “really, honestly actually”, stronger, often emotional or emphatic.

So oikeasti is fitting because the speaker is insisting that the bus really was broken, i.e., the accusation was unfair.

Why is it bussi oli rikki and not some other case or ending on rikki?

Rikki is an adjective meaning “broken”. In bussi oli rikki:

bussi = subject (nominative)
oli = past tense of olla (to be)
rikki = predicate adjective (describes the subject)

Predicate adjectives in Finnish stand in the same basic form (nominative-like) and do not take case endings in simple “X is Y” sentences:

Bussi oli rikki. – The bus was broken.
Ovi on auki. – The door is open.
Auto on uusi. – The car is new.

So rikki stays in its base form here.

Why doesn’t bussi have an article like “the” or “a” in Finnish?

Finnish has no articles (no words like a, an, the).

Definiteness/indefiniteness is understood from context:

bussi oli oikeasti rikki
can mean “the bus was actually broken” (a specific bus you both know about) or “a bus was actually broken” (if that fits the context).

You don’t mark this with a special word, you just rely on what both speakers know from the situation or previous sentences.

What tense are syytti and oli, and where is the “did” or “was” like in English?

Both syytti and oli are in the simple past tense (imperfekti in Finnish).

syyttää → syytti = accused
olla → oli = was

Finnish doesn’t use a separate auxiliary like English “did” for the past. The past is just shown by changing the verb form:

English: He *did accuse me.*
Finnish: Hän syytti minua.

Similarly, oli itself already means “was”, there’s no extra helper verb.

Is Hän specifically “he” or “she”? How do I know the gender?

Hän is a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun. It covers:

he
she

Finnish does not grammatically mark gender, so hän can be either, and the gender is only clear from context or from additional information.

In everyday spoken Finnish, people often use se instead of hän when talking about people, but hän is the standard written form.

Could the word order change? For example, can I say Minua hän syytti myöhästymisestä?

Yes, Finnish word order is flexible, and you can move elements for emphasis.

Hän syytti minua myöhästymisestä.
= neutral: He/She accused me of being late.
Minua hän syytti myöhästymisestä.
= emphasizes minua: It was *me that he/she accused of being late (not someone else).*

Basic rule: Finnish tends to place new or emphasized information earlier in the sentence, but the canonical neutral order is Subject–Verb–Object: Hän syytti minua.

Why is Hän syytti minua myöhästymisestä and not Hän syytti minua olemaan myöhässä (more like “accused me to be late”)?

Finnish usually prefers a noun + case structure here rather than a verb construction.

Verb pattern:

English: accuse someone of being late
Finnish: syyttää jotakuta jostakin
→ person in partitive (minua), cause in elative (myöhästymisestä)

You can construct sentences like syyttää jotakuta siitä, että hän oli myöhässä (accuse someone of the fact that he/she was late), but:

Hän syytti minua myöhästymisestä is shorter, more natural, and uses the standard government pattern of syyttää.

So Finnish tends to nominalize “being late” (myöhästyminen) and then mark it with the correct case instead of using an infinitive structure.