3x365 Russian Words, Day 24

Today we trained pronunciation of “З” so our words are perhaps less interesting:

“я не знаю/ я занят / я занята”

“I don’t know / I am busy (when I am masculine) / I am busy (feminine)”

“En tiedä / Minulla on kiire”

  1. знать - Wiktionary - to know - tietää

  2. я - I - minä

  3. занятый - Wiktionary - busy - kiireinen (adjective) / kiire (noun)

Note, there is neither grammatical gender in Finnish nor gendered third person nouns. It is just “hän” for everyone (a little bit like singular “they/them”). Furthermore in colloquial speech “hän” is often replaced with “se” which strictly means “it”.

I’ve studied English almost 40 years now and I still mix up she/he almost daily - my mental model is based on “hän” and it is hard to learn away from it.

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