Created: 01/04/2025 - Last updated: 09/06/2025
I've been learning Finnish for many, many years, and although the learning resources are pretty limited, I thought I would finally organize the different tools I've used over the years.
The outline of this article is going to be quite different from my other language resource articles (Japanese & Mandarin Chinese) because Finnish just doesn't have that many specialized tools.
For Finnish immersion resources, check out this article.
This is the book series I've used the most, mainly because it's the one most Finnish classes rely on, but I've also enjoyed using it when self-studying. This book is completely in Finnish, so if you start from nothing you might have to spend quite a bit of time translating things in the beginning, but you should quickly become comfortable as long as you learn the vocabulary along the way. Suomen Mestari provides reading practice, vocabulary lists, grammar explanations, and plenty of exercises to practice what you've learnt, so I really like it as an all-in-one method! In the latest editions, they've added more puhekieli, which I think is a good idea given that's what people actually speak, and more audio exercises. This article by Uusi Kielemme details how to access the audio files for the books. For the books I use (not the latest edition), the files are available for free on the editor's website (log in -> Materials -> Free audio materials -> Finn Lecturan maksuttomat äännitteet ONL -> Suomen mestarin äännitteet).
It's been a few years since I last used books from the Oma Suomi series, but I remember really enjoying them for self-learning. They're quite similar to Suomen Mestari, but have a more playful vibe while still teaching the basic principles of the language well.
The Assimil method just doesn't work for me - I need proper grammar rules, which it doesn't provide. Assimil's idea is based on immersion, and going through dialogues until you get an instinctive grasp of the language, which sounds good but doesn't work for me, and in general I think Finnish grammar is so hard that this kind of method can't get you very far.
I tend to dislike relying heavily on apps when it comes to language learning, and this is even more true when it comes to Finnish. Because it's a language not a lot of people are interested in learning, many language apps don't have courses for it - and when they do, they're often very short or have more mistakes than popular languages do due to a lack of people reporting them. In the end, the only apps I'm currently using are for vocabulary learning. I will still list here all the ones I've tried for future reference.
Anki is the only app I'm using daily as of 2025. Anki is good because it's so simple: a basic flashcard system, customizable but at its core very plain, free, open-source and without ads. When it comes to the content, you can either find some user-created decks online or create your own. I currently create my own decks in Anki, with vocabulary I encounter in textbooks, TV shows and daily life. In the beginning, I would recommend using ready-made decks, but as you advance, creating your own deck allows you to focus on the vocabulary you actually need and will use.
Last tested around 2023. Drops is a vocabulary learning app, with a 5 minutes / day system for free accounts, and unlimited learning for premium accounts. The flashcard decks are all pre-made by the app and organized by subjects (food, family, going to the dentist...). I actually did have a premium account for Drops for a while, but I only did 5min/day even then, so if I still used it I would be happy with the free version. I liked Drop's UI a lot, but its teaching method lacked a strong, long-term review system, its vocabulary categories were too strict, and the fact that the vocabulary is disconnected from context (they're not lists of vocabulary used in my textbooks nor lists I created from vocabulary I've heard in my life) meant I ended up forgetting a lot of the vocabulary I had learnt on there after a while.
Last tested in late 2024. Pimsleur gives 30min audio lessons - ideally you do one per day - and close to no written material. The idea is that if you start to learn by listening and speaking, your pronounciation will be much better than if you focus on written material without audio. I do like this idea and the lessons I tried, but my main problem is that the Finnish course is very short, and can be completed in one month, so by the time I tried it my level was already much too high for it. Another thing to watch out for is their pricing - the app is expensive, and you shouldn't be fooled to buy any kind of lifetime or even yearly subscription given that their full Finnish class can be completed in one month!
Last tested in mid 2025. Back when I started learning Finnish in 2014, there was close to no app teaching the language, so when I found Mondly and the lifetime subscription was 20€, I jumped on the opportunity! My main problem with Mondly is that it uses the exact same class for all of its languages, which makes absolutely no sense. For instance, it has an inbuilt structure around gender, whereas Finnish has no gender. This makes using the app quite exhausting to use, because it might flag some answers as wrong when they're correct, or teach vocabulary that isn't relevant (eg. teaching the one non gendered pronoun twice for he and she). That being said, I checked it again after having a more advanced level, and I enjoy Mondly for reviewing longer sentence structures (unlike most apps which only teach single word vocabulary).
Last tested around 2022. I can't talk about language learning apps without talking about Duolingo. For many years before the Finnish course was created, I kept complaining about its absence, and I was super excited when it finally came online! Unfortunately, I quickly realized that Duolingo wasn't everything I'd hoped it was, and especially its lack of grammar explanation made the Finnish course very complicated and confusing (Finnish grammar is notoriously difficult, so you can't just... guess rules). The course was also pretty short, and of course the recent changes with Duolingo now over-using gen-AI just made everything worse. Duolingo is still a decent option to take a dip in the language and test if you like it enough to study it seriously, but I wouldn't recommend it as a serious learning tool.
Last tested in late 2024. This app teaches you vocabulary in context, meaning that it gives you sentences to memorize. It's audio-based, and the voice recordings are made by native speakers instead of robot-voices, which I appreciate. However, there's a lot of mistakes in the Finnish course - mostly over- or under-translations (eg. "abandonned" translated as "empty", "robbery" translated as "bank robbery", or "the bed" translated as "my bed", etc.), which makes it kind of unusable for learning vocabularly properly.
Last tested in late 2024. Beelingua's idea is to give you access to small texts in your target language, as well as their translation in English, to encourage you to consume media in your target language. Although the idea is good, I'm pretty sure all the texts as well as the translations are AI-generated, and I found a few mistakes, which makes it hard for me to trust any of it for learning.
Last tested around 2020. Depending on when you're reading this, the courses I used to enjoy on Memrise may have all been deleted. In the beginning of my Finnish journey, Memrise was the only app I used - its main advantage being the user-made flashcard decks, meaning there was a lot of Finnish material when close to no apps had Finnish courses. People had made dedicated decks to learn the vocabulary of the textbooks I learnt from and it was very useful! I liked the learning algorithm alright, and the UI was very nice too. Unfortunately, in a classic capitalistic move, Memrise's quest of profitability over usefulness lead them to slowly phase out the community courses, first removing them from the app and then announcing that they would delete them at some point in the future. This is especially upsetting considering the fact that all those courses had been made by volunteers gaining nothing from it, and now they're thrown to the trash so Memrise can promote their own paid courses. Anyway, Memrise doesn't even have an official Finnish course so that's that for this app (yes, I have a lot of resentment).
Remember to check out my Finnish immersion resources page, as practicing listening and reading skills is an essential part of learning!
I really love Sanakirja to look up Finnish words and use it all the time when creating my Anki cards!
The Finnish Teacher is a very useful blog which explains grammar rules in a straight forward way. Where some textbooks give rules little by little to avoid overwhelming students (eg. "there are five verb types", and a few chapter later they suddenly add a 6th one), the Finnish Teacher lists everything from the start, with good explanations. I wouldn't use it as a sole learning ressource because then it might get pretty overwhelming, but as a cheat sheet and side helper it's wonderful!
The YKI test is the main official way to prove your Finnish level, which is needed if you ever want to apply to the Finnish citizenship - which is something I very much wish to do one day. To validate your test for the citizenship application, you need to pass the intermediate YKI test (in Finnish or Swedish).
The test consists of four subsets, for which you will get a separate grade:
To pass the YKI test for the Finnish citizenship, you need to participate in all 4 subsets in one day, and you need to get at least a grade 3 in two different subjects, but only the following subset combinations are accepted:
Find more information about the YKI test here:
The main place to try on the full test is on the YKI testi website.
There are other websites which offer various YKI-themed exercises: