Today I borrowed a book called Saagem tuttavaks - viron kielen alkeiskirja (Saagem tuttavaks is Estonian and would be something like "Let's get to know each other" in English and viron kielen alkeiskirja is Finnish and means "Estonian study book for beginners"). Perfect, I thought and was surprised to see that everything was explained in less than 190 pages. Texts, vocabulary, grammar and exercises... However, the grammatical explanations were like these: "You just form the genitive by adding some letter to the end of the nominative form. Shouldn't be hard for a Finnish speaker since 50% of all the Estonian words are similar to Finnish words....".
And that was it. That's how you form the genitive form! And the past tense was taught in the second lesson! Page 19! Can you believe that? I can't!
So I'm going to return this book to the local library tomorrow and borrow a proper study book so that I'll learn some Estonian.
Good luck with your Estonian studies! You should have an advantage over me seeing that you are a native speaker of Finnish.
ReplyDeleteI would recommend Juhan Tuldava's book "The Estonian Textbook". I simply can't praise this book enough. You should be able to find it in your local library or even buy a copy of it. I have the English version but the original was in Swedish so that might suit you better. If you are looking for help with grammar this is your bible.