Can a Finnish speaker understand Estonian? | Mini Challenge

Mutual intelligibility within the Finno-Ugric language family is generally limited due to the significant linguistic differences between languages. We created this language challenge to give you a chance to see for yourself how well Finnish and Estonian speakers can understand each other based on similarities between those two languages. If you're a speaker of a Finno-Ugric language do volunteer in for the future videos so we can run more experiments like that. 🤓

The Finno-Ugric language family is a branch of the larger Uralic language family, which includes languages spoken primarily in Finland, Estonia, Hungary, and regions of Russia. This family consists of two main branches: Finno-Permic and Ugric. Some well-known languages in this family include Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, as well as various minority languages such as Karelian, Udmurt, and Khanty.

🤗 Big thanks to 🇪🇪 Kristofer and 🇫🇮 Antti for participating in the video.

🏋️‍♀️ Support my Work:
My name is Norbert Wierzbicki and I am the creator of @Ecolinguist channel. You can support my work by volunteering to participate in the future videos or donating to the project.

🎥Recommended videos:

🤗 Big hug for everyone reading my video descriptions! You rock! 🤓💪🏻

#learnestonian #learnfinnish #languagechallenge #languages

[diiou]

Great effort! Would be lovely to also have a karelian, võro or sámi speaker introduced to the mix.

[romantriller]

They sound quite similar for me as a non-Estonian and non-Finnish speaker. The only difference I notice is, that Finnish seems to be way more sing songy.

[closetmonster]

0:25 I think Antti thought that the Estonian word häbi means joy, because it sounds like the English word happy, but in reality it means shame and is a cognate with Finnish word häpy 'shame, vulva'

[ohmp]

As a Finnish speaker I feel that it's often easy to guess what Estonian words mean even when they are totally different than equivalent word in Finnish.

An example word that I have guessed myself is "jalgratta" which is Estonian for a bicycle. It's a compound word from "jalg" (foot) and "rattad" (wheels). In Finnish a foot is "jalka" and "ratas" means a cogwheel. From that it's easy to deduce that the word must be a bicycle. In Finnish a bicycle is "polkupyörä" which comes from verb "polkea" (pump the pedal or stamp down) and "pyörä" (wheel).

[Анна-фец]

I don't speak either of the languages and I am impressed, how they managed to communicate, I thought it would be more complicated

[cayenigma]

I wish I could volunteer, but I am too eager to guess based on assumptions and not actually listening XD

[fedcom]

Мне, как русскому, кажется, что, несмотря на свою "похожесть", эстонцу и финну не так легко понять друг друга.

[Willing_Herold]

The finnish sounds like he’s unenthusiastically singing

[Caldera]

Finn here with no understanding of Eesti.

"Kui sa tunned kurbust"
"tundeid nagu häbi vöi pettumus"
"sa tunned pahasti pärast"

What I got from these:
"You can feel it in your throat (Kurkus)"
"The feelings can be ??? or regret"
"You feel bad after"

I thought it was going to be 'sorrow'.
In Finnish we have a saying of "itku kurkussa" which translates something a kin to "holding the cry in your throat".
That's why I thought it was going to be 'sorrow'.

[miya_kim_h.]

Finnish is more sylabic and melodic languague, more like Japanese or Italian about construction of words, Estonian sounds more Germanic.

[spicytranslations]

Finnish almost has a Roman-commander sounding tone.. or at least that's what I imagine is the tone of Latin😂

[Lunaholic]

This one was easy. I understood 90% of what Kristofer said (I'm from Finland and I don't know Estonian)

[heh]

An Estonian can understand Finnish better, mainly because Finnish is spelled way morw clearly, while Estonian has plenty of these fake friend words and the words are spelled with weak letters like b or d, that usually are p and t in Finnish.

[thinkpolish]

As a Polish speaker I enjoyed watching this challenge (and many others), I liked the melodies of both languages a lot, even though I couldn't understand either of them. And of course I tried to solve the challenges in English 😊 I'm so impressed every time I see people from different countries holding effective conversations in their respective languages, so big thanks to Norbert for running this channel! 😊

[julikarolyi]

As a native speaker of Hungarian I'm quietly mourning we just can't take part in any of this... Could we have a video on language isolates please? (OK, Hungarian is of course a Finno-Ugric language, so it's related to Estonian and Finnish... about as closely as English is to Persian.) 😢

[Fantam-BamboU]

I hear clearly the difference and that pretty fun

[japeri]

It would be interesting if someone who speaks Hungarian joined this conversation, as these 3 languages ​​have the same root.

[thunderflower]

Is finnish literature translated into estonian ?
Is Kalevala translated in Estonian?
Do both countries have official goverment translation services when signing official bilateral agreements?
Do more people from estonia migrate to Finnland or Finnish people to estonia?

Crossing fingers i ll get answers from Estonian and Finnish people :)

It is also intriguing to find out what history books of each vountry...say about the other..friends..brother cousin nations..same genetic finger lrint .or linguistically brothers?

[verbrannte]

As a Hungarian native speaker, I can confirm that I understood NOTHING.

[hr]

Estonian dude needs a new mic - sounds like idk... 2007 ventrilo