General characteristics of Finnish verbs

A verb is a word which denotes actions, events, or states of being. In more simple terms, it shows what someone is doing. Or what happens; if it's raining, there's not necessarily anyone who is doing the rain, but still "to rain" is a verb.

One important feature of the verb is, that it describes the relationship between subject and object. Subject is the one, who is doing something. Object is the other, it's the target of the action. Thus, verb expresses what the subject is doing to the object.

In Finnish, it matters a lot who is the subject. This is called personal conjugation:

As you can see, the verb has different endings, depending on the subject (The 3rd singular (he/she) is marked by long vowel.)

In addition to 6 persons, Finnish verbs have also other forms. There are some examples below, but they are very arbitrary, since there are not always equivalent translations in English, or quite often English has one form, which covers several functions. Click the titles to find out more information about the forms.

4 tenses

Finnish verbs have 4 Tenses. There's no future tense, but you can use present tense to talk about the future. The past tenses are more or less the same as in English.

4 Moods

There are 4 moods in Finnish. Often times English uses modal verbs (such as "may" or "would"), but Finnish has its own forms. Potential is rather marginal.

2 Voices

Active is the default and in addition to that there's the passive.

5 infinitives

Infinitives are verb forms which behave like nouns. The first infinitive is the one you can find in dictionaries. The 2nd and 5th are marginal.

2 participles

To conjugate a verb, you need to know which type it is. There are 6 different types of verbs.

Verb is the "head" of the sentence. It determines the meaning of the sentence and what other parts it may, or has to, include.

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