So You Thought French And German Were Difficult!

Most of you will have grappled with French, German, Spanish or maybe even dabbled in Russian and Mandarin at school but very few of you will have come across Estonian.

Estonian is a Finno Ugric language related to Finnish and Hungarian and, as thus, bears little resemblance to Indo European languages such as English and German. If you want a real challenge, here are a few facts about the Estonian language:

There are 14 cases - this means that with singular and plural there are 28 different endings to learn for each noun (not taking into account irregularities of which there are many).

There are no definite or indefinite articles - so no words for `a` and `the` There are no genders and personal pronouns do not differentiate between male and female There are lots of double vowels

Try to pronounce the following words:

hauaööõudsused (terrors of the night time grave)

kuuuurijad (researchers of the moon)

jäääär (the edge of the ice)

Have you given up yet?!

I grew up bilingually speaking Estonian at home and English at school and I spent eleven years of my childhood attending Estonian school every Saturday. That is why I found it relatively easy to learn other languages. I still use written and spoken Estonian on a daily basis.

If you would like to learn more of this fascinating language, I should be delighted to enlighten you! I guarantee that you will never view language learning in the same light!