Finnish and Japanese??

8 comments

1. Japanese nouns don’t inflect or conjugate.

2. Japanese, doesn’t have cases and nouns don’t inflect or conjugate, what you have are case markers (は、が、に、を、で…) which are used to tell you what part of the sentence that word is. For example:

   私はリンゴを食べる

   Word for word:

   私 – I/me

   は – Topic particle

   リンゴ – Apple

   を – Object particle

   食べる – Eat

   As you can see the particles は and を come after the words I and apple and they tell us that I is the topic, or what we are talking about; and apple is the object, or what receives the action that the verb describes.

   Sadly, finnish and japanese have nothing in common, the pronunciation might be easier for you if you speak finnish rather than only english, but that’s about it, good luck though!

3. My understanding is that both Finnish and Japanese are considered “agglutinative”. But for Japanese that applies more to the verbs. As others have said, the nouns do not inflect at all. One other thing to clarify is that the concept of definite/indefinite does not exist in Japanese (I mention this because your examples all included “the”)

4. No, you can’t.
   Source: Finnish, studying Japanese.

   While there are definite similarities in some components of the languages such as suffix indicating question, the ”conjugation” in the two languages is very dissimilar.

   A basic (over-simplified) example of similarity through how to indicate a question:
   私は日本人です。　私は日本人ですか。
   Minä olen japanilainen. Minäkö olen japanilainen?
   I’m Japanese. Am I Japanese?

   But in general like already said, the languages conjugate very differently. You can’t add personal inflection (persoonamuoto) to words in Japanese or add case markers (sijamuoto) in Japanese.

   You can change, however, verbs and adjectives in past tense. First one is quite common to all languages I know, the latter not so and definitely not a part of Finnish language.

5. > Does conjugation work the same in japanese for nouns?

   The major difference is that Finnish case inflexion attaches at the noun level and Japanese case inflexion attaches at the phrase level, this is similar to how say ”-‘s” works in English compared to “-n” in Finnish to create the genitive:

   – kissa**n** ja koira**n** pää
   – a cat and dog**’s** head
   – nekoto inu**no** atama

   In this case “-no” is fulfills this genitive function in Japanese, but as with ”-‘s” in English, it only attaches to the last noun in the phrase, not all of them. Otherwise the order of morphemes is the same.

   Furthermore, Japanese has an entirely different set of cases that have different functions. There’s surely no such thing as a partitive case in Japanese, a part of Finnish considered tricky to master, but apart from that there are some similarities.

   – Annan koira**llekin** ruokaa
   – Inu**nimo** esao ageru

   In this case “-nimo” more or less means the same thing as “-llekin”. It’s also composed of two parts “-ni” and “-mo”, meaning “to” and “too” respectively which similar to Finnish are attached in succession, but of course these have widely different functions otherwise in both languages.

6. Stop thinking about English or Finnish or whatever when speaking or understanding Japanese. You can’t make accurate comparisons between fundamentally different languages

7. Heya, others have already sufficiently discussed your question, just an FYI: conjugation is when a verb is altered, the appropriate term for nouns (and pronouns, numerals, adjectives and sometimes adverbs) is declension. Both terms fall under one category, which is called inflection (word modifications to express grammatical information).

8. Finnish is not Japanese