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“Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

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Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#41

Post by mb_72 »

sunaurus wrote: post #8

An interesting thing I've noticed is that a lot of the younger generations in Estonia use English a lot when expressing themselves, especially when talking to their peers. I constantly hear everything from single English words in sentences, to fully English sentences used in-between Estonian ones. I'm sure this is something that's happening everywhere (because of things like Hollywood and most of the internet being i…

I'm half-Australian, half-Estonian, but don't really speak any Estonian yet still live here (sorry, nationalistic Estonians!). My wife is Estonian, and our nieces speak English to each other quite a bit when I'm around (and, I suspect, some significant part of the time besides that).

People like me are definitely 'part of the problem' with the Estonian language being not as used as it should be, however outside of Estonia the language - as beautiful as it is and as significant a part of my heritage as it is - is almost useless. I've done some courses + read some books, and can understand the language a reasonable amount, but I cannot speak it. Time-wise, I find it hard to justify over learning more skills for my software development trade.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#42

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

sunaurus wrote: post #8

An interesting thing I've noticed is that a lot of the younger generations in Estonia use English a lot when expressing themselves, especially when talking to their peers. I constantly hear everything from single English words in sentences, to fully English sentences used in-between Estonian ones. I'm sure this is something that's happening everywhere (because of things like Hollywood and most of the internet being i…

Young people across Europe use lots of English words or even whole sentences. It tends to be a fad though, a way for young people to show off how trendy they are. Once my own peer group in Romania all reached their thirties and were no longer so interested in showing off, everyone generally dropped the English admixture and went back to speaking fairly “pure” Romanian.

Granted, Estonian may be in a different situation due to demographic factors.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#43

Post by simias »

Mirioron wrote: post #33

> When I asked our teacher how children learn which case to use, her rather wonderful reply was that “it comes with mother’s milk”. As a native speaker, I think the real answer is experience. You pick up most of the patterns simply by using the language. I think that's how most people learn English as well. English grammar rules are mostly a mystery to me and many of my peers from school. Estonian grammar is slightly…

From personal experience I think English speakers have troubles approaching synthetic languages in general because the English language is very analytic. I lurk in a few language-learning forums and I try to help anglophones learning French from time to time, they're often overwhelmed by the conjugations and to a lesser extent the grammatical genders which are omnipresent in French grammar.

On the other hand I've been studying Russian pretty intensely over the past year or so, so I can definitely empathize with the frustration of having to learn a complex case system.

I think the important thing is: it doesn't really matter if you get it completely right (or even mostly wrong). As long as you build simple sentences a native speaker will be able to figure out what you're trying to say. If somebody asks me "tu parlons anglais ?" it's definitely going to sound very wrong to me but I'll probably be able to figure out what you're attempting to communicate.

I think it's worth it to actually learn the declension/conjugation tables to familiarize yourself with them but you have to face the fact that you'll probably never learn to use them correctly just by memorizing rules. Eventually as you encounter them IRL you'll start to develop a feel for it.

I wonder if the average English speaker would be able to explain why they say "if I were you" and not "if I am you". Yet few get it wrong.

More generally I find that the main difficulty in learning languages is, by far, vocabulary. You can often get by with a surprisingly low amount of grammar if you understand what the words mean.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#44

Post by Mirioron »

apecat wrote: post #30
exDM69 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't :) As a Finnish speaker with some exposure to Estonian language, I can understand written and spoken Estonian better than any other language I've had such little exposure to. I'm not very good in speaking Estonian and I can't write it at all.

Out of curiosity, how did you go about picking up this fluency in Estonian? Are there any good sources of particularly easy Estonian to get started? I'm semi-interested. Granted, I'm also super lazy, but Finnish and Estonian should be close enough to just have some threshold to get over until it's pretty smooth, I guess? Fwiw, I'm native in Swedish, but I speak and write Finnish daily. To go on about my earlier compa…

I'm not sure about an answer to your question, but something to look out for are false friends. There are plenty of Finnish and Estonian words that sound the same or similar, but mean something different. Eg

EE: ära surra (to die) - FI: surra (to mourn)

EE: vaim (ghost) - FI: vaimo (wife)

EE: kannatus (suffering) - FI: kannatus (support)

EE: pulm (wedding) - FI: pulma (difficult problem?, puzzle)

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#45

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

mdmoll wrote: post #23

A wonderful introduction to the Estonian language and some of its quirks. I have minor quibbles, although my relationship to the language is as a non-native historian of the country, not a Finno-Ugric linguist or local. I always felt (rather unscientifically, of course) as though Estonian traded some of the agglutinative regularity that characterize Finnish and Hungarian for greater vocabulary familiarity for Germani…

> I've found a knowledge of German to be quite helpful when trying to guess the meaning of a word (or to extemporaneously construct one) using a calque from German.

The same can be said of Hungarian. In spite of Hungarian being a Uralic language and utterly opaque to the neighbouring countries, so many of the verbal derivations (especially since the 19th-century language reform) are calques from German. I found it easier to memorize certain Hungarian verbal idioms by storing them mentally alongside their German models.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#46

Post by Mirioron »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #42
sunaurus wrote: post #8

An interesting thing I've noticed is that a lot of the younger generations in Estonia use English a lot when expressing themselves, especially when talking to their peers. I constantly hear everything from single English words in sentences, to fully English sentences used in-between Estonian ones. I'm sure this is something that's happening everywhere (because of things like Hollywood and most of the internet being i…

Young people across Europe use lots of English words or even whole sentences. It tends to be a fad though, a way for young people to show off how trendy they are. Once my own peer group in Romania all reached their thirties and were no longer so interested in showing off, everyone generally dropped the English admixture and went back to speaking fairly “pure” Romanian. Granted, Estonian may be in a different situatio…

I don't know if it's really a fad. I use plenty of English words when speaking Estonian to somebody that also speaks English well. Sometimes the language switches every other sentence or even mid-sentence. Some concepts are just easier to put forth in English.

I suppose part of this is that a lot of tech vocabulary in Estonian either doesn't exist or is quite awkward.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#47

Post by simoes »

Great article showing some of the complexities in Estonian, really appreciated this breakdown.

I recently worked on a data visualization platform for the trade statistics office in Estonia (https://data.stat.ee) and many of the nuances from this article came up while we were working on the bilingual version of the site.

For example adding prepositions in front of country names, required us to write a custom function taking into account the normal "rules" and exceptions.

Here is the case for Estonia + preposition

From Estonia: Eestist

To Estonia: Eestisse

With Estonia: Eestiga

Between … and Estonia: Eesti ja … vaheline

And now here is the case for the UK + preposition. (notice the extra g added in the from, with and between cases)

From United Kingdom: Ühendkuningriigist

To United Kingdom: Ühendkuningriiki

With United Kingdom: Ühendkuningriigiga

Between … and United Kingdom: Ühendkuningriigi ja … vaheline

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#48

Post by exDM69 »

apecat wrote: post #30
exDM69 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it isn't :) As a Finnish speaker with some exposure to Estonian language, I can understand written and spoken Estonian better than any other language I've had such little exposure to. I'm not very good in speaking Estonian and I can't write it at all.

Out of curiosity, how did you go about picking up this fluency in Estonian? Are there any good sources of particularly easy Estonian to get started? I'm semi-interested. Granted, I'm also super lazy, but Finnish and Estonian should be close enough to just have some threshold to get over until it's pretty smooth, I guess? Fwiw, I'm native in Swedish, but I speak and write Finnish daily. To go on about my earlier compa…

I'm not fluent at all. I had several long vacations there as a child, visit every now and then and have some exposure to news and culture. And I'm pretty good in getting a superficial understanding of a language, good enough to read or listen to news and understand the gist of it. I can handle several languages I have never formally studied.

Re: “Did You Eat the Whole Cake?” On Learning Estonian

#50

Post by ujjain »

SamBam wrote: post #37
alecmg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shuddered when I saw what a 4 letter word got mutilated into originally (russian) it was Борщ And coincidentally Borš in estonian. And in dutch it became borsjtsjsch? How? Why? Why do you need 8 letters to transmit a single phonem? No wonder dutch can construct these weird word combos. Edit, nvm, apparently last sch belongs to next word. Still creepy

Is it really? Googling for "borsjtsjsch" gives me just this thread. You've created a combination of letters never seen before by Google! https://www.google.com/search?q=borsjtsjsch&nfpr=1

borsjtsjschrokkende

- borsjtsj

- schrokkende

borsjtsjch does not exist, borsjtsj does.

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