Have you noticed that some Finnish verbs go together with a noun (or pronoun / adjective / numeral) in the illative case?
For example, the verb rakastua, “to fall in love”, requires certain words to be in the illative case. Here’s an example sentence from the video below:
Minä rakastuin suomalaiseen mieheen. = I fell in love with a Finnish man.
The words suomalaiseen mieheen are in the illative case. Their nominative (“basic”) form, suomalainen mies, only gets you so far. Just like you have to say I fell in love WITH a Finnish man in English, you have to pick the illative case because you’re talking about falling in love WITH someone. In English, you don’t just say “I fell in love Finnish man”. And similarly, you can’t use the nominative case suomalainen mies in the Finnish example sentence above.
Obviously, if you are a beginner in Finnish, this may all seem a little overwhelming (in which case, check out my beginner-friendly posts and my online course for beginners). However, if you are at a point where you start to pay attention to the Finnish cases and verbin rektio in the Finnish language, this video is for you. If you want to learn more about it, you can dive deep into the world of the Finnish cases in my online grammar course about them. You can find out more about Case by Case here.
If you just want to listen to and read a few example sentences that contain verb + illative structures, go ahead and watch the video below: