The second language: Estonian

Since I had already bought the second HP book in Estonian, I thought I possibly should learn some basics of the language. For Finns, Estonian sounds really familiar and I guess we could intuitively understand some 30-60% of the vocabulary. There are many exactly same words used, and quite often Estonian language uses words of some Finnish dialect or has only small variances.

When I had to learn some more Spanish to get my Master's degree, I tried a method, which I found quite amusing and effective. In Finland it is quite common that when you want to learn a new language as an adult, you can go to a course in university or some other school for a couple of years. Usually there are 2 books as a material, one per year. Since I don't have time to go to some courses (I didn't do that in university either), I bought only the books. Yes, I can not learn to speak the language by only reading the books, but that was not my intention to. In the beginning, I just want to learn to read the languages.

So, I went to library and loaned 2 books of Estonian basics for adults. I must admit, the books had some authentic Soviet-era-East-European flavor. Black and white images and a lot of text. Well, if I wanted comics, I would have got some. I wanted text and this totally has it.

Reading Estonian turned out to be really easy, since it resembles Finnish so much. Most of the time I could just read through the chapters and check some words and then continue to the next chapter. When I used this method for Spanish, I often had to go back to previous chapters, so I could recall some words and sayings.

Well, it took about a month to read through the basic books. I had already finished reading the English first book, so I could continue straight to Harry Potter ja Saladuste Kamber.