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

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

   hottentottententententoonstelling

One of the interesting differences about Dutch spelling compared to English, is that there's an official institution (Nederlandse Taalunie, literally Dutch Language union), that sets the spelling and spelling rules for most words. The spelling of Dutch thus is the same in the Netherlands, Belgium and Suriname. The uniformity in spelling means that for most Dutch words (not loan words), you can easily tell how they're pronounced by the way they're written, as opposed to English that never really changed their spelling of words, despite some shifts in pronunciation. Readings older Dutch texts is takes slightly more effort, because the spelling of some words can be completely different from what it is now.

I only recently learned that there are rules to the order of adjectives in the English language [1]; it was never taught to us in school, we just used them enough that I know it by what sounds right. Ex "the big, red balloon", not "the red, big balloon".

[1] https://www.gingersoftware.com/content/grammar-rules/adjecti...

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.

As a (non-fluent) Spanish speaker I get a similar experience hearing Portuguese, the words sound similar but different and the speaker sounds slightly drunk.

Greek sounds very close to Spanish but none of the words mean anything, it's really weird :)

I have a Swedish friend who described Danish speakers as sounding "like they're speaking Swedish with rocks in their mouths"

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.

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

> The extent of irregularity came as a shock. I had always believed that the Finno-Ugric family of languages, to which Estonian belongs, was “agglutinative” – that is, with words being formed by adding strings of endings in a regular way. Estonian has far more irregularity than this would suggest: consonant gradation can make forms difficult to recognise, and every putative rule seems to have exceptions.

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 can add all case endings to that one stem. In Finnish, you have to memorize at least two stems (strong and weak stems). In Estonian, things are even more complicated.

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.