Finnish on Andrew Quinn's TILs

Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary

Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note for numberphiles: all numbers have been rounded to their first significant digit, because I’m a fan of Rob Eastaway’s “zequals” method of getting to the point when it comes to estimation. It’s much more valuable to walk away with the heuristic “some dude got a 300x memory reduction by swapping out a database he hacked together for a tiny, static, specialized data structure that does exactly what he needs it to and no more.”

Using LLMs to generate small semantic perturbations for language learning writing practice

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Still images of this GIF are at the bottom.

Learning to read a language is mostly a game of getting massive quantities of comprehensible input. Learning to write that same language is a whole ’nother ballgame. But, using the 4-quadrant Anki card setup from my earlier post, I think I’m finding more and more ways to make this as amenable to spaced repetition as possible.

One thing I’ve been experimenting with with surprising success is the idea of using LLMs to generate “semantic perturbations” on sentences I already “know” how to write, where “know” = “have in active review in Anki”, for our purposes.

The language learning "Delta" Anki card pattern

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

+--------------------------+------------------------------------------+
|       L2, fixable        |              L1, intention               |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------------+
|        L2, fixed         |   L1, (fixable -> fixed) explanation     |
+--------------------------+------------------------------------------+

The above 2x2 layout for Anki cards, which I call a “comprehensible delta”, is one of the best things I’ve happened upon in a while for learning another language. Let’s say you are learning Finnish, and you want to say

LLM tutored writing practice for secondary language acquisition

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Language learning for the contemporary adult learner can be broken down roughly into four highly correlated, but distinct, skillsets.

	Passive understanding	Active production
The written word	Reading	Writing
The spoken word	Listening	Speaking

You may know from my FOSS software that I have been learning Finnish for the past 4 years or so. For the first few years I pretty much focused exclusively on reading comprehension, as I consider that to be the easiest quadrant to skill up in first. This focus put me in the interesting position for some time of being able to read most YA fiction and tax documents while being unable to order a pizza for myself on the phone.

Cross-platform TUIs are easier than cross-platform GUIs

Tue, 20 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Below is a GIF of tsk, my pocket Finnish-to-English dictionary, running in my terminal emulator of choice under Linux. It’s what the kids call a TUI, a graphical program that just happens to drive its graphics using terminal graphics instead of graphics-graphics.

Insert GIF here.

You can probably tell that this program fits neatly into the “home-cooked meal” clade of programs. There is a very straightforward problem I want solved - fast, single-executable-portable dictionary lookup, with a few conveniences for the busy language learner layered on top. I am quite happy with tsk in its current iteration and don’t plan to add much more to it anytime soon. It would still save me a lot of time and hassle if I were the only person who could use it.

The highest personal ROI program I have written so far

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It would have to be finstem, a simple command-line program I wrote to reduce Finnish words down to their root form.

Finnish is a lot like Latin or Russian in that its words often become lumbering behemoths of rewritten consonants, suffixes upon suffixes, and this makes it hard to look up in a dictionary – that is, until you factor in its very regular orthography and the phenomenal efforts of the Finnish programming industry: finstem is basically a very specialized UI for the OpenOffice spell checker, and I have no shame in admitting that.

The 10 sentences heuristic for foreign vocabulary acquisition

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In order to learn a word, we need to come across it several times.
It seems that the minimum amount of times we need to meet a word is
somehwere around 7 or 8 meetings, but it's very hard to put a figure
on it.

-- Paul Nation, [2020 Victorial University of Wellington](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlJj8vpJxfE)

He’s right, but that never stopped me. I say 10 sentences in a specific practice: When you come across a word you don’t know enough times for it to bother you,

Been quiet - studying Finnish

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hei kaikki. I’m going dark for the rest of the year as I switch my attention to reading a lot of Finnish, since Free Voluntary Reading is the best way to learn a language.

Hyvää joulua ja onnellista uutta vuotta!