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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

#91

Post by dsego »

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've noticed that younger people sometimes use english idioms when there is no equivalent substitute to convey the same expression in the native language.

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

#92

Post by FabHK »

iicc wrote: post #36
himlion wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly looks interesting, but in an era where I've been conditioned to expect free content $335 is a bit steep to indulge in a casual interest.

Maybe it's a price anchoring tactic to make the subscription plan ("The Great Courses Plus" - which includes this) look like good value.

Yeah, plus they have period revolving discounts, where you get it for 80% or more off.

I must say I started listening to The Great Courses way before Udacity, Coursera, EdX, and so on, and back then it was really a good and competitive source (and, at discounted prices, reasonably priced) to get a variety of professionally produced audio courses. Nowadays of course there are more alternatives.

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

#93

Post by Gravityloss »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #78
dmitriid wrote: post #32

I always find it strange how language materials insist on presenting agglutination as cases. I was lucky enough to not have it when I studied Turkish, so for me the - -da is "in", not "locative case" - -(y)a is "towards", not "locative case" etc. I personally find that insisting that students learn proper case names greatly hinders the learning process. Finnish and Estonian are also agglutinative, and I feel abject h…

> Finnish and Estonian are also agglutinative Finnish and Estonian are synthetic languages now. While the Proto-Uralic language ancestral to them both was more agglutinative, the system of consonant gradation (and subsequent loss of consonants) as it developed in these languages means they are no longer very agglutinative. In a purely agglutinative language you only have to memorize one stem for a word and then you c…

Current limitations of English centric software language parsing means it's annoying to type machine generated or parseable text in Finnish.

For example pinging people in Facebook comments doesn't work with correct Finnish.

English: "this would be useful to @Pekka"

Correct Finnish: "tämä olisi hyödyllistä @Pekalle".

Machine parseable but incorrect Finnish: "tämä olisi hyödyllistä @Pekka :lle"

It would probably be possible to make a library to understand the transformed forms of words.

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

#94

Post by anticensor »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #78
dmitriid wrote: post #32

I always find it strange how language materials insist on presenting agglutination as cases. I was lucky enough to not have it when I studied Turkish, so for me the - -da is "in", not "locative case" - -(y)a is "towards", not "locative case" etc. I personally find that insisting that students learn proper case names greatly hinders the learning process. Finnish and Estonian are also agglutinative, and I feel abject h…

> Finnish and Estonian are also agglutinative Finnish and Estonian are synthetic languages now. While the Proto-Uralic language ancestral to them both was more agglutinative, the system of consonant gradation (and subsequent loss of consonants) as it developed in these languages means they are no longer very agglutinative. In a purely agglutinative language you only have to memorize one stem for a word and then you c…

Consonant gradation/assimilation happens at the surface phonology and do not affect the morphological ground form. We have a similar voicing assimilation in Turkish; however, devoicing is progressively applied and do not propagate more than one syllable, unlike Finnish.

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

#95

Post by apecat »

defen wrote: post #68
apecat wrote: post #2

As a Swedish speaker, I get this deeply rooted feeling of righteous indignation about not understanding spoken Danish. I'm only half-joking. As a Finnish speaker, I don't get that feeling with Estonian. The written form is different enough to warrant a deeper look before I start whining about how annoying I find language studies in general.

> As a Swedish speaker, I get this deeply rooted feeling of righteous indignation about not understanding spoken Danish. I'm only half-joking. I have a Swedish friend who described Danish speakers as sounding "like they're speaking Swedish with rocks in their mouths"

...or hot potatoes.

Anyway, add the Vigesimal system for numbers above 49 and you're really off to the races https://www.kbh-sprogcenter.dk/en/blog/learn-danish-numbers/

For the sake of hilarity, let's add that Icelandic people are forced to study Danish in school Because Reasons. Icelandic is not mutually intelligible with the major Scandinavian languages, even in written form. The argument for studying Danish is of course that everyone benefits from Nordic countries sticking together.

But Danish is the most cumbersome way to get some of that benefit of a common language.

Some Icelandic professor character actually recently dropped a hot take, suggesting that Icelandic schools could switch to teach some form of Finland Swedish, because it'd be remarkably easy for Icelandic speakers to pronounce and probably the easiest option for most people in the Nordics to grasp relative to effort. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...

Being a Swedish speaker from Helsinki, Finland, I kind of don't like the nasality of my own dialect. I'd prefer to listen to dialects from the Swedish west coast around Gothernburg all day, because those are very soft sounding. But the suggestion likely makes some sense. Formal/common institutional spoken Finland Swedish is indeed overly articulated and devoid of slang.

Informal Finland Swedish tends to be hyperlocal and may carry loan words from Finnish, which is a non-starter in the other Nordic countries, and very much frowned upon by Swedish schools in Finland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland_Swedish

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

#96

Post by apecat »

exDM69 wrote: post #48
apecat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mm, I referred to 'fluency' as a sliding scale, which I think is a thing.

But anyway, there we probably have it, your vacations as a child. No lifehacks can beat exposure to language at a young age, I guess. SAD.

Waiting for the day when some drug can trick the brain into some semblance of a kid's language learning skills.

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

#97

Post by mb_72 »

distances wrote: post #69
mb_72 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Es…

Which highlights that multicultural families should keep using their native languages when talking to their kids. It's a big asset later in life! My niece is currently adoption three languages (mom, dad, kindergarten) and I know another kid that is exposed to four. They seem to have no trouble whatsoever switching to the correct language when they've figured out which one each adult is speaking with them.

I 100% agree, but my mother made the decision not to teach myself or my brother any Estonian when we were young as "there was no point as at that time it seemed Estonia would be part of the USSR forever and you'll never go there anyway". My Dad disagreed with this approach, but went along with it; it's one reason they're still married. :)

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

#98

Post by Yetanfou »

On the subject of weird language constructs there's also the following correct Swedish sentence:

Bar barbarbarbarbar bar bar barbarbarbarbar

This translates to 'naked naked-barbarian-bar-barbarian carried a naked naked-barbarian-bar-barbarian', a worthy competitor to the well-known Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

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