Learn Hardcore Finnish: Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute vähentää epävarmuutta ja auttaa jatkamaan. - This kind of encouraging feedback reduces uncertainty and helps me to continue.

Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute vähentää epävarmuutta ja auttaa jatkamaan.

This kind of encouraging feedback reduces uncertainty and helps me to continue.

Breakdown of Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute vähentää epävarmuutta ja auttaa jatkamaan.

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Questions & Answers about Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute vähentää epävarmuutta ja auttaa jatkamaan.

What exactly does tällainen mean, and how is it different from tämä?

Tämä means this (a specific, concrete thing near the speaker).

Tällainen literally means this kind of / a … like this / such. It describes the type or kind of thing, not a single specific item.

In the sentence:

tällainen rohkaiseva palaute = encouraging feedback like this / this kind of encouraging feedback

Grammatically:

tällainen is an adjective formed from tämä
- -lainen (kind/type).
It agrees with the noun (palaute) in case and number. Here both are nominative singular: tällainen palaute.

You would use tämä palaute when pointing to one specific instance of feedback, and tällainen palaute when talking about the general type of feedback (as in the sentence).

What kind of word is rohkaiseva? Is it just an adjective or some verb form?

Rohkaiseva comes from the verb rohkaista (to encourage).

It is the present active participle of rohkaista.
As a participle, it functions like an adjective: rohkaiseva palaute = encouraging feedback.

Formation pattern:

Verb stem + -va / -vä
rohkaista → stem rohkaise- → rohkaiseva
It declines like a regular adjective: rohkaiseva palaute, rohkaisevaa palautetta, etc.

So semantically it’s an adjective (encouraging), but morphologically it’s a participle derived from a verb.

What is the grammatical role of tällainen rohkaiseva palaute in the sentence?

Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute is the subject of the sentence.

Subject: tällainen rohkaiseva palaute
Verbs: vähentää and auttaa
Objects/Complements: epävarmuutta, jatkamaan

So:

Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute (subject)
vähentää epävarmuutta (predicate + object)
ja auttaa jatkamaan (predicate + infinitive complement).

The same subject (palaute) performs both actions: it reduces and it helps.

Why is palaute in the singular, even though in English we often treat “feedback” as uncountable?

Finnish palaute can behave both like a count noun and like a mass noun, but:

In the nominative singular (palaute) it often refers to feedback in general or one instance of feedback, depending on context.

In this sentence, tällainen rohkaiseva palaute is more about the type of feedback in general (encouraging feedback of this kind), not a specific number of items. Finnish still uses the basic singular form for that.

There are no articles in Finnish, so palaute can correspond to English:

feedback, the feedback, or this feedback, depending on context.

Why is the verb vähentää singular and not plural? Shouldn’t it agree with more words?

The logical subject is palaute, which is singular:

palaute vähentää = feedback reduces

Both adjectives (tällainen, rohkaiseva) simply modify palaute; they do not create multiple subjects. So the verb is in 3rd person singular:

(se) vähentää – it reduces

The same singular subject also carries over to auttaa:

Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute vähentää… ja auttaa…
= Such encouraging feedback reduces… and helps…

Why is epävarmuutta in the partitive case and not epävarmuuden?

Epävarmuutta is the partitive singular of epävarmuus (uncertainty).

With vähentää (to reduce/decrease), Finnish usually uses the partitive for the thing whose amount is being reduced:

vähentää epävarmuutta = reduce some uncertainty / reduce the level of uncertainty

Reasons for partitive here:

Uncountable / abstract noun: epävarmuus is like a mass (can’t be easily counted).
Partial effect: You decrease it, but you are not necessarily making it disappear completely. That kind of “partial object” is typically partitive.

Epävarmuuden (genitive) would sound like you are reducing a clearly delimited, total amount of a specific uncertainty. That is much less natural in this generic, abstract sentence. The partitive epävarmuutta is the normal, idiomatic choice.

Can you explain the structure auttaa jatkamaan? What form is jatkamaan?

Jatkamaan is the illative of the third infinitive (often called the MA-infinitive) of jatkaa (to continue).

Pattern:

Verb: jatkaa
MA-infinitive base: jatkama-
Illative ending: -an / -än
→ jatkamaan

The construction auttaa + MA-infinitive (illative) means help (someone) to do something:

auttaa jatkamaan = help to continue / help (someone) keep going

Other examples:

auttaa oppimaan – help to learn
auttaa muistamaan – help to remember

In standard Finnish, auttaa almost always takes this -maan / -mään form, not the plain basic infinitive.

Why is it auttaa jatkamaan and not auttaa jatkaa?

In standard written Finnish, the verb auttaa normally governs the MA-infinitive in the illative (-maan / -mään):

auttaa tekemään, auttaa ymmärtämään, auttaa jatkamaan

Using the basic infinitive auttaa jatkaa is possible in some spoken or informal varieties, but it is less standard and can sound non‑standard or dialectal in writing.

So:

Correct and neutral standard: auttaa jatkamaan
Recommended in learner Finnish: always use the -maan / -mään form after auttaa.

Who is being helped in auttaa jatkamaan? Why is there no pronoun like sinua?

The sentence leaves the “who” implicit. Literally:

(It) helps (someone) to continue.

In Finnish, if the person is obvious from context or meant in a general sense (people, you, us), it is very common to omit it.

You could explicitly say:

…auttaa sinua jatkamaan – helps you to continue
…auttaa meitä jatkamaan – helps us to continue

But in a general statement about the effects of feedback, leaving it implicit sounds natural and slightly more universal, like English:

Such encouraging feedback helps you keep going.
Such encouraging feedback helps one to continue.

Finnish does not need the pronoun here, and omitting it is idiomatic.

What is the subject for auttaa in ja auttaa jatkamaan? Is it still tällainen rohkaiseva palaute?

Yes. The subject tällainen rohkaiseva palaute applies to both verbs:

Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute vähentää epävarmuutta
ja (tällainen rohkaiseva palaute) auttaa jatkamaan.

Finnish, like English, does not repeat the subject before the second verb when it is the same subject. The conjunction ja (“and”) links the two predicates that share one subject.

What exactly is the role of ja here? Could we use sekä instead?

Ja is the basic coordinating conjunction and. It simply links the two verbs:

vähentää epävarmuutta
auttaa jatkamaan

You could also say:

…vähentää epävarmuutta sekä auttaa jatkamaan.

Sekä is also and, but it often feels a bit more formal or emphatic in writing, and is often used in the pattern sekä X että Y (both X and Y). In this specific sentence, ja is completely natural and neutral; sekä would be acceptable but slightly more formal‑sounding.

Why is there no Finnish word for it in the sentence? In English we might say “It reduces uncertainty…”.

Finnish usually does not use a separate pronoun when the subject is already expressed or clearly understood.

Here, the subject is:

tällainen rohkaiseva palaute

So Finnish does not add a pronoun like se (“it”) in front of vähentää or auttaa. That would be redundant:

Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute se vähentää… → sounds odd in neutral prose.

The verb form vähentää already encodes person and number (3rd person singular), and the noun phrase in front clearly identifies who is doing the action. Thus, Finnish just says:

Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute vähentää epävarmuutta ja auttaa jatkamaan.

Could the word order be changed, like Epävarmuutta vähentää tällainen rohkaiseva palaute? Would it mean the same thing?

Yes, you can change the word order in Finnish more freely than in English, but it affects emphasis.

Tällainen rohkaiseva palaute vähentää epävarmuutta…
→ neutral, focusing first on what kind of feedback we’re talking about.
Epävarmuutta vähentää tällainen rohkaiseva palaute…
→ puts more emphasis on epävarmuutta (“uncertainty”), almost like:
It is uncertainty that such encouraging feedback reduces…

Both are grammatically correct and have the same basic meaning, but the given sentence has the most neutral, typical word order for a textbook-style example.