Torstai-iltana katsomme elokuvaa kotona yhdessä.

at home

Breakdown of Torstai-iltana katsomme elokuvaa kotona yhdessä.

• me: we
• katsoa: to watch
• yhdessä: together

Questions & Answers about Torstai-iltana katsomme elokuvaa kotona yhdessä.

In Finnish, do you normally capitalize torstai (Thursday), or is it just capitalized here because it’s at the beginning of the sentence?

In Finnish, names of days (maanantai, tiistai, keskiviikko, torstai, etc.) are not normally capitalized.

In your sentence, Torstai-iltana starts with a capital T only because it is the first word of the sentence.

In the middle of a sentence you would write, for example:

• Menemme uimaan torstai-iltana.
  “We’re going swimming on Thursday evening.”

Here torstai-iltana is lowercase.

Why is there a hyphen in Torstai-iltana? Could I write it differently?

Torstai-iltana contains a compound noun:

• torstai = Thursday
• ilta = evening
• torstai-ilta = Thursday evening

In Finnish, many combinations like this are written as one “word” (a compound). When the first part ends in the same vowel the second part begins with, a hyphen is usually added to keep it easy to read:

• torstai-ilta (not torstai ilta as two separate words)
• without the hyphen it would be torstaiilta, which looks odd and is harder to read at a glance.

So:

• Correct: torstai-ilta, in the sentence torstai-iltana
• Not correct as two separate words: torstai ilta