home

Learn phrases in the Estonian language by selecting the phrases that you want to learn from the list on the right.

These cover a wide variety of Estonian topics, including the numbers in Estonian, days of the week in Estonian, Estonian greetings and the months in Estonian. The Estonian phrases have audio recorded by a native speaker.

Estonian language learning games

As well as the flashcards for the Estonian phrases on the right, there are additional learning games for colours, days, fruit, months, numbers and vegetables.

Test whether you know the difference between a õun, kartul, küüslauk and porgand, can count едно, kaks, kolm, and know roheline from kollane.

The Estonian Language

Non-Indo-European languages present the native English speaker with particular challenges. Word origins are not shared so acquiring a vocabulary is more difficult, and the grammatical structure can be radically different. Both these factors are true of Estonian.

On the plus side there is no grammatical gender in Estonian nor is there a definite or indefinite article; there are also many imported words which tend to turn up in areas of interest to the visitor, krediitkaarte and tualettpaber being two useful examples.

German speakers will be helped by the large proportion of German load words. Another positive is that Estonian is a highly phonetic language.

Two important characteristice of Estonian are that it is primarily an agglutinative language and that it has a special syllable-accent system.

An agglutinative language is one in which meaning is conveyed more by adding components to words rather than relying on word order or prepositions, so in Estonian single words often have to be unpacked into an English phrase. This process can frequently be seen at work in English, although it is not a primarily agglutinative language like Estonian, e.g. in the formation of words like 'beautiful', 'backwards', 'fullness', 'hyperactivity', etc and especially in the formation of new words, particularly from Latin and Greek.

The Estonian syllable-accent system is unusual. It has three contrasting vowel and consonant lengths, short, long and 'overlong', which can represent important differences in meaning. Thus taevas (short e) means 'sky', taevas (long e) 'in the sky'; lina 'linen', linna (two short n's) 'of the city', linna (long n and short n) 'into the city'.

Long sounds are simply indicated by doubling the vowel or consonant. The extra-long sound is not indicated by any special mark, but among the consonants b d g count as singles, while p t k are doubles and pp tt kk are extra-long.