Learning Estonian: My First Steps

Annabel Laul provides an Estonian's perspective as Jackson Crawford discusses his first 48 hours of trying to learn Estonian and his thoughts on the language.

[MichaelLoda]

I'm just waiting till he starts writing his own narrative story like Tolkien

[SionTJobbins]

Estonian is such a cool language. So light sounding, on tip toes. And as a Welshman and Welsh speaker, I've so much respect for them for fighting for their language. People always go on and on about how beautiful French is, but French is just a lot of dipthongs. Estonian, Finnish, Basque, Irish, Breton as all nicer languages to listen to with a beautiful balance of vowels and consonants.

[kindaimmortal]

Estonian has been terribly challenging, but I love the sound and feel of it. Nowhere near fluent yet, but it's been fun.

[jumalAnni]

To answer your question around 7:22

Keel = language
Kell = clock, bell
kel = short of 'kellel' (alalütlev/adessive of kes 'who')
The last two have the same pronunciation.
Some other things. 's(i)' is the most common past tense (lihtminevik) marker. The less common one is 'i' which historically was the only one (or so I have heard). Now it is present in some of the more basic words. Also, 'v' always marks present tense.

Also, you keep aspirating K, P, T. Maybe you actually don't want to have that accent...

Good luck with all the languages you want to learn.

[Optiqe_]

As an Estonian, I have to say, I am impressed. You have only studied it for 48 hours and well of course you don't know much but for that little time, you know quite a bit about the language. Good job!

[rrsjr]

Awesome! I'm terribly interested in non-Indo-European languages, particularly Finnish, and Estonian. To hear a linguist discuss this is very gratifying, thank you for this. It's interesting that some pronouns seem to be cognate with Indo-European ones (ma/me-moi/me; ta-/te-tu/toi; sa-sie).

[danieldahlborg]

I would think the reason Estonian feels more intuitive than Finnish is because it has adapted more to Indo-European languages, even in syntax. Finnish is more genuinely Fennic, more archaic, in its form.

[herrakaarme]

I once said in the comments of another video with Estonian being spoken that as a Finn it feels like I should understand Estonian 90%, but in reality I only understand 5%. It sounds very familiar, but in reality it's an altogether diffferent language, removed far enough that you'd need to study it for real to know it. Not to mention so many words that look the same or almost the same have a different meaning.

[joebarrera]

My man decided to become a giant on his Nordic adventures. But yeah Estonian sounds very melodic

[anutuulmets]

A good example of short and long vowels: jäätis (ice cream), jätis (scumbag, scoundrel).
We don’t shorten words much like Finns, but it is definitely used when counting numbers. Instead of kolmkümmend viis, kolmkümmend kuus (35, 36) most people would really say kolgend viis, kolgend kuus.

[d.rabbitwhite]

I met an Estonian once when In grad school, when he just mysteriously turned up at my door, in Washington State. His name was Vilyar. Sat in yard space, conversed about the stars and capitalist constructs (and why he was in the US), and cats, and drank tea for a coupla hours. Very surreal experience. I think he was sad. An US company had exploited him. I have since, been interested in Estonia and would like to learn the language and somehow come across Vilyar for another long conversation.

[samcook]

My first encounter with the Estonian language was the band Metsatöll. I saw them when they toured with Finntroll (a Finnish band which sings in Swedish) around the end of 2013. Because a lot of folk metal bands are from Finland and sing in Finnish (such as Moonsorrow and Korpiklaani; Korpiklaani was originally Sami but started singing in Finnish and English to be more marketable if I understood correctly), knew what Finnish sounds like enough to think that Metsatöll sounded similar but not quite the same. And then it made a lot of sense when they said that they were from Estonia.

[sharonjackson]

"Negative verbs" aren't so strange when you consider "don't" and "doesn't" in English where the auxiliary is conjugated, leaving the main verb in the infinitive form.

[Ithirahad]

So kuusi = Finnish spruce drink; kusi = American beer!

[melissahdawn]

Reminds me of my obsession with learning to play instruments or finding new needlepoint techniques, it is fun to see the joy of trying out a new language to play around with. Estonian is made to seem like a new plaything..."let's see what I get do with it." I love that sort of feeling when finding a new venue. So, this video reminded me of that feeling, and it was a pleasure to watch.

[antstorim]

Awesome to see Dr. Crawford trying Estonian! Estonian actually has three lenghts: short, long and overlong. Though both long and overlong are written in the same way (double letters) they are pronounced differently. For example short "koli" means "junk", long "kooli" is genitive case of school ("school's") and overlong "kooli" is partitive/short illative case of school ("into the school"). Lengthening "l" instead would give long "kolli" for genitive case of "bogey/monster" and overlong "kolli" is partitive/short illative case.

[Darnaguen]

As a Finn I definitely think Estonian is softer and more musical than Finnish. 'Generic' Finnish at least, some of our dialects are more musical, particularly the more Eastern ones. I also believe the farther back you go in time the more similar Finnish is to Estonian, many words that are very archaic and all but forgotten in Finnish are still in use in almost the exact same form in Estonian (and/or Karelian).

[ohmp]

As a native Finnish speaker I can say that I understand eg. signs, ads etc. in Estonia quite well, but it's almost impossible to understand their speech more than maybe the context.
In the end you were talking about that Finnish has often "extra letters" in the end of words when comparing to Estonian. That's true, Finnish "likes" to have a wovel in the end of words. Also many words that are loaned from Swedish or Russian are finnishized so that eg "i" is just added to the end. Especially in the southeastern dialects of Finnish it's typical to drop those end wovels so that many words sound a little like Estonian. But if you look at the map, long time ago in the history there was just Ingria between southeastern Finland and Estonia by land, so all of those have gotten influences from each other I think.

[Drewe]

These videos are awesome, I’d love to see you travel around the world learning languages.

[lecros]

When visiting Estonia I was quite surprised by how many words I could understand in written Estonian as a German speaker. I was able to make a good guess about the content of a text because of a lot of German loanwords. But the impression i got was, that those loanwords were limited to more specialized vocabulary, which was usefull in getting a rough idea of the topic but I had absolutely no understanding beyond that. And when spoken I understood precisely 0%.