Finnish is a synthetic and an agglutinative language. This means that words in Finnish have a stem called "body", and other parts inside them which make up the meaning. Finnish is similar in this respect to the Japanese language, Turkish language, and Latin language. In Finnish, there are 17 cases/word types (sanatyypit). You can think of a "case" as an ending added to a word that helps describe its purpose in the sentence. Verbs have 5 tempora (present tense, past tense, perfect, pluperfect and future tense). In addition, verbs have two participle (active and passive) cases. Gerunds, which are nouns made from verbs (for example: reading - to read) also exist in Finnish (lukeminen - lukea), are abundant in Finnish.