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Tecktight TAC 2012 Team Sputnik | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Tecktight Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States Joined 4974 days ago 227 posts - 327 votes  Speaks: English*, Serbian Studies: German, Russian, Estonian | Message 41 of 96 02 April 2012 at 3:34am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Aitäh! I think your knowledge of Finnish definitely gives you a head-start on Estonian. According to my Estonian professor, anyway (she told some of my Finnish classmates that they can go ahead and skip the introductory units, since they have foundations in the linguistic style of the language already). I hope you'll jump in the crazy pool with us some day, though it seems you have your hands full already! I need to go check up on gdoyle. My first class is on Wednesday, so I'll give another update then. I just printed out my vocab list and am supposed to know most stuff from the first unit by then. Everything is conveniently entirely in Estonian already, so navigating our book + online materials has been a tad frustrating thus far. I'm a bit scared for next week, but we'll see how things pan out... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Tecktight Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States Joined 4974 days ago 227 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian Studies: German, Russian, Estonian | Message 42 of 96 02 April 2012 at 3:35am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Too bad the Tallinn airport isn't much to remark on, but I'm still eager to hear your impression of the place. Were the luggage racks up to expectation? ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Tecktight Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States Joined 4974 days ago 227 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian Studies: German, Russian, Estonian | Message 43 of 96 02 April 2012 at 8:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Quick recap for last week/Sunday:
Estonian (only started on Sunday): 1.5 hours. I think I got basic pronunciation down. It's all rather phonetic and logical, except, of course, for õ. We'll see what the professor says. I then skimmed through the next 5 chapters of my book just to get a feel for what's coming up. German: Read 130 pages of my little storybook this week. Whew. It took me forever because I chose to look up every word I didn't understand. Some might say this isn't the best way to read a book--it probably isn't--but I wasn't so much reading the thing as I was mining it for new vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 44 of 96 02 April 2012 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
LOL - no, I agree that the airport is not the most exciting place, I was more thinking of Estonia in general. The only impression I can give from the airport is that it was clean, people were very friendly and their English was good. Plus it was nice and small, so it was easy to find our way. To my untrained ear Estonian sounded like Finnish, but I guess that is not exactly breaking news :-) The air line, which was un Estonian low cost company, also gave a very good impression, so I would like to go back soon to see Tallinn properly. The three hours I spent there last year was not enough to get an impression. So will you be going to Estonia any time soon? Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 02 April 2012 at 3:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 45 of 96 02 April 2012 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Really? I thought that I've been swimming in it since at least last summer by having taken on some Inari and Northern Saami while staying focused on Finnish, not to mention strongly considering dabbling later this year in Mari. I've had my fill of Estonian a few years ago after a trip to Estonia. I like the language, but I don't like it so much that I'd want to go beyond "Teach Yourself Estonian" (especially when the closely-related Finnish has been much easier on me by having more discernible patterns in the grammar. When I was learning Estonian I was sometimes flummoxed by the virtual arbitrariness of stems' forms which are vital to inflection). As an outsider to Uralic languages, I should qualify my statement about the degree to which knowing Finnish clarifies some aspects of Estonian. As DavidO noted here, certain things in Estonian make some sense when you know about the comparable structure in Finnish. However I think that it's more prudent to pick your spots when trying to see Estonian through a "Finnish lens". Not only do you want to avoid getting off on the wrong foot with your vocabulary by misinterpreting false friends but you don't want to fall prey to the pedagogical mistake made in "Colloquial Estonian" by presenting Estonian obliquely as some deviant form of Finnish. The most egregious error in my view is that the course treats the "-da" infinitive as the main Estonian infinitive. If we were learning Finnish and if Estonian's structure were even more similar to Finnish then this which would be valid since the "-da" infinitive is cognate with the Finnish first infinitive "-a/-ta" which is its main infinitive. This approach is of dubious value here since it's instead the "-ma" infinitive that is the primary Estonian infinitive and this corresponds to the Finnish third infinitive (e.g. Finnish: Menemme uimaan huomenna. "We will be going to swim tomorrow" vs. Haluaisimme uida huomenna "We would like to swim tomorrow") since you can form most of the frequently-used conjugations starting from this "-ma" infinitive. In contrast knowing the "-da" infinitive allows you to form somewhat less common items such as the pluperfect, compound past ("perfect"), negative simple past ("negative imperfect"), and imperative for anyone other than the 2nd person singular. Another problem is that "Colloquial Estonian" (and "Teach Yourself Estonian" for that matter) present Estonian vowel length as if it were distinguishible between short and long thus tacitly aligning to the Finnish division. The reality is that Estonian vowels can be overlong, long, and short and this three-way distinction is used among other things to make inflectional distinctions that would otherwise be compromised or ambiguous because of the strong apocope that distinguishes Estonian from Finnish (apocope is the loss of final syllables that are often unstressed. For Estonian this meant that many case endings in old Estonian that are maintained more or less in standard Finnish are absent or strongly eroded in modern Estonian thus often requiring another method to convey inflectional information). P.S. I apologize if the second part of the post seems a little out of place, but whenever I hear of instances where people make a lot out of the discount (e.g. your teacher lets the Finnish students skip ahead of the introductory material), I can't help get a bit curmudgeonly. By analogy if I were attending a course in Frisian or Afrikaans, I still wouldn't expect the teacher to cut a free pass for me on the introductory material even though my being a native speaker of English makes these languages childishly easy at the beginning. That's how bad habits often build up because the first impression is that what you're learning can be reduced to some variant of your native language, and it can be difficult to shake that impression or remove fossilized errors/misconceptions that have crept in by the time you get deep into the foreign language. Edited by Chung on 02 April 2012 at 9:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Tecktight Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States Joined 4974 days ago 227 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian Studies: German, Russian, Estonian | Message 46 of 96 03 April 2012 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Chung, you're absolutely correct about the danger of looking at Estonian through a Finnish lens. I'm not sure quite what the teacher is thinking. I believe the teacher might have communicated with the Finns in our class beforehand, and so established based on their individual criteria into what group they should be placed. Perhaps one or two of them has an Estonian parent, or perhaps some are studying/living in Estonia...I really have no idea. But, indeed, I misspoke. If I'm jumping in the crazy pool, you're already way at the bottom. I've only just started and I already have a massive headache. Our textbook is astoundingly unclear. There are no English translations save for a simplified vocabulary list. The list is helpful, of course, but I find it tiresome to be flipping through the pages of that vocab packet all the time just to be able to understand what a single 1/5th of a page of my textbook is saying. I'll probably have to supplement my learning with other materials. I was thinking of getting either "Teach Yourself" or "Colloquial" (or both)--as for the vowel lengths, the only good thing about my textbook and CD is that it presents them properly. The CD is a lifesaver, considering how few audio samples are available for Estonian... In any case, my knowledge of Finnish is not great enough to greatly affect my Estonian learning. At this point, especially considering how complicated both languages are for someone like me with very little experience in anything outside Romantic and Slavic languages, I think I'll be calling myself "hopeless novice" for a long, long time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Tecktight Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States Joined 4974 days ago 227 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, Serbian Studies: German, Russian, Estonian | Message 47 of 96 03 April 2012 at 5:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm glad you found the airport agreeable, Cristina. Your opinion should be very valuable to the country, considering your expertise in transportation/travel matters. You should definitely go back to explore the country itself, though, if you get the chance. I think it's beautiful. :-) As for me, I'm hoping to get to Estonia this summer. My mother's Russian friend has a second home in Tallinn and invited us to come stay. Plus, I have a good friend in Tartu whom I'd really like to visit. Of course, it all depends on whether the Russia gives me a multi-entry visa. Otherwise, I can't leave the country until August. :/ 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 48 of 96 03 April 2012 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I wish they would drop the visas like Ukraine has done. Russia would be of interest to so many people that
tourism alone would boost their economy vastly. I would love to pop over for an extended week end now and then. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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