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I'm a Finnish speaking person and once I was in Estonia buying something, it took me a moment to realise the salesman was speaking Estonian to me and not just bad Finnish :D but we kinda understood each other
I drive a Taxi in Helsinki, and not long back, had an Estonian customer who didnt' speak Finnish, but was very talkative - with a little bit of effort we managed to hold a conversation where we mostly understood each other. 😁 It took some mental effort and imagination though - often I would find a connection between some word and another rarely used word in Finnish, or a word in Finnish used in a slightly different way. I rather suspect that I could learn Estonian with exposure and with a little instruction, enough to understand most Estonian speech.
I was in the Beer House in Tallin and there was a drunk woman there who only spoke Estonian. I got that her family was from Russian, and she didn't like Russians. Eventually though she tried to purloin my beer and I called the staff to kick her out lol. I think that even though she hated Russians, she still acted like one.
Great that you still had the conversation in your own respective languages and at least somewhat understood each other :D English would've been boring compared to that! I don't have many experiences on talking to an Estonian except for this one drunk construction worker who I met at a hostel in Tallinn. He claimed that he's working in Kuopio (if I remember correctly) and I was trying to talk with him for more than an hour. He switched between English, Finnish and Estonian all the time and I couldn't make up what he was saying in any of those languages
@@lurji Nice, although it's not my real name. It refers to a guy who makes videos as well. His real name is Petri Ranta and he lives in a town called Hyvinkää. "Hyvinkäältä" = "from Hyvinkää"
@@katti2227 yeah in all seriousness there are a few words (of course not obvious loan words like "auto") and if you learn the rules for the corresponding sound changes between the languages then you can understand more words. Helps that I studied linguistics too.
As a native Finnish speaker, my favourite false friend in Estonian is 'hallitus': Estonian hallitus = mold (as in mouldy bread), in Finnish hallitus = board of directors or council of state.
There's another good one, in Estonian a hawk is 'kull' and both the genitive & partitive 'kulli'. You can make compounds like 'öökull' and 'kanakull'. If you take a train from Tallinn to Tartu then there's also a stop/village called Kulli - announced loudly on the PA :)
As a Finnish person, Estonian always sounds to me like they're really optimistic, enthusiastic or possibly a little drunk. From what I've heard from Estonians, the opposite is also true: many Estonians think that a Finnish person speaking Finnish sounds like an overly serious farmer who just wants to be done with their fields. Many Estonians who know Finnish/live in Finland speak it incredibly well, but it's often easy to tell that they're from Estonia because their intonation goes up and down more. This might not be as obvious just by listening to this video. Finnish people can be extremely flat in their casual speech, and the Finnish guy in this video is doing a good job, but obviously adding a little extra cadence so that the sentences don't sound completely dead (same can be heard in Finnish commercials, for example).
During the Cold War the people in Tallinn could watch Finnish tv, officially it was illegal but people found their ways. It was kind of a window to the western world, showing stuff like "Dallas" and "Knight Rider" :) Foreign tv shows had subtitles in Finnish, thats one way people learned Finnish back then.
If i remember story from my late grandmom she used to bring chips to estonia which helped them to watch finnish tv. She was working as an accountant for polytechnic school in capital area. And she got chips from there if i remember correctly.
@@applessiini988 Sorry to interfere, but he told about Tallin (that is the estonian capital)... So, it seems quite clear to me that he is from Estonia. If you are not used to the Cold War time, think that people from the so called "communist" countries could not watch films or ads from capitalist countries. Be the opposite was also true. I am from Brazil, and I could never watch a film from the USSR, Cuba, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the DDR (German Democratic Republic), nor any other country from the "communist word".
enceladus there weren't many "windows" to Europe in the Soviet Union, but after the Soviet Union broke, some countries were still dictatorships (Belarus, Kyrgyzstan), but there was some time when windows inside Europe started to appear and they got access to other countries radios (for example there was a polish radio, which was close to Poland-Ukraine-Belarus border, which told about the real situation in the world). Ukraine became much more free during 2000s, but Belarus has one president for over 25 years
Damn Paul, I'm a native Finnish speaker and you really know your way with languages. This video is extremely accurate, only error that I spotted was that verb learn in finnish is oppia, not opia. When I watched this Paul's video that compared Russian and Ukrainian, the comment section was full of people who said what I'm saying now. Keep up the good work!
He compared there even West Ukrainian dialects to standard Ukrainian. I as a western ukr was SHOCKED😍🇺🇦. This video was interesting for me as well because i used to study Estonian and when I read some post related to Kaisa MäkäräinenI could even get a word from there😄😂
Although I would point out his mistake concerning word order in estonian, as there can be multiple ways the words can be put together not just one correct way. As example "Kui sa aeglesemalt sõidaksid, saaksin kaarti lugeda." could also go as "Kui sa sõidaksid aeglasemalt..." This changes the focus of the problem expressed from speed to the nature of driving. In this example however it makes little difference, but the latter is usually said when the speaker is very annoyed by the driving manners and the speed of it just adds to the whole thing. Also can be considered to be more offensive and Karen. "Õpin ülikoolis kirjandust." can also be said as "Õpin kirjandust ülikoolis." or even "Ülikoolis õpin kirjandust." To sum up the differences, the first word is the most important one and the last word the least. Also regarding grammar at 10:20. In estonian "Laua peal" can also be said "Laual" like in finnish.
Hi! I learned Finnish back in 1993 -1994 when I was an exchange student in southeastern Finland. In April 2017 I was able to visit again and during my short stay I managed to squeeze in a short trip to Tallinn. I was amazed at how similar both languages sound, intonation and all, yet I can only grasp the odd word in Estonian. Both are beautiful languages indeed. Lämpimiä terveisiä Costa Ricasta. Great work!
Reminds me of Standard German and Yiddish. From afar, Yiddish speakers use a very similar melody so you think you're going to 'get it', but when you start listening to what they're saying, you realize that you need another language course.
As a Finnish person, trying to understand Estonian is like talking to someone with a REALLY heavy dialect or accent. It feels like you should understand them, but for whatever reason you just have no clue what they are saying.
I can make out Estonian words that are very similar and make guesses what is in question. It's trippy and fun, but it you're actually talking to an Estonian, one should be mindful of the "danger words", I.e words that are almost homonyms between Finnish and Estonian, but have different meanings :D
@@jorgen1990 don’t know about you but I can understand Portuguese more than well, Italian too and many other Romance language, I would say that happens to me with French instead.
Estonian is a happy language :) I'm a Finnish person and I always enjoy hearing the Estonian announcements on a ferry cruise to Tallinn. I usually understand the topic and few words here and there but never the details. I think I could understand well if I was intensively exposed to the language for one year.
That's interesting: I would never think about my language being considered as happy :) I also enjoy hearing these ferry announcements, but the Finnish ones. Finnish sounds like cool for me, but unfortunately can speak it very little.
@@priit1985 Many Estonian verbs sound like the "relaxed" forms of Finnish ones. Like the verb "lugesin" on the video: It means the same as "luin" but sounds much more like "lukaisin", which adds the meaning that you did it easily, without any effort and in a short time. The Bible is quite a long book, so that example sentence at 10:55 caused me to laugh out loud. :D And there are many more similar examples, not just verbs. Estonian sounds like there's no worry in the world. :)
Every Finnish person ever who has been on the viking line cruise know the announcement "tere tulemas Tallinnaa" I know I probably spelled that wrong but u don't know how to speel Estonian.
When I called Finnair phone service the person answered in beautiful Finnish language. I asked immediately: " You speak so nicely, you cannot be Finnish?". And he confessed to being an Estonian.
When I spent my holydays in Tallinn in 1982. Our guide told us about the tourists from Finland and that the Languages are a bit similar. She told: "Both languages share appr. 600 words an if an Estonian guy and a Finnish guy are together and each one has 100g (vodka), they don't need no translator anymore."
I can understand both Finnish better but I think me being half-Finnish half-Estonian has something to do with it and a bonus is that I can call myself the finest (Fin-Est)
This is from Swedish dialects which show forms for cat like "kisse", "kise", "kissa", "kiss". Probably ultimately from a cat call "kis-kis-kis" used throughout Europe, at least in Spain, Italy, Russia and Sweden.
I was just researching the difference between accusative and partitive case in finnish, it’s really fascinating. Great timing, now I get to rest for 18 minutes!!
Yeah that one is maybe one of the biggest things you learn when you learn finnish grammar. and one of the most difficult aspects as well because mostly completely different than other languages use of undefined amounts of things or matter
@@nopo_b3645 that's tough for us Brazilians. we DON'T use partitives. if I want some cake, I just say "I want cake". it's kinda hard to internalize that further explanation
The difference of total and partial objects, subjects and complements is quite similar in Estonian and Finnish. Ostin leipää ja juustoa. X Ostsin leiba ja juustu. (I bought some bread and cheese.) Ostin leivän ja juuston. X Ostsin leiva ja juustu. (I bought the bread and cheese.) Miehiä tuli sekä rannalta että metsästä. X Mehi tuli nii rannalt kui metsast. (There were men coming both from the beach and from the forest.) Miehet tulivat metsästä. X Mehed tulid metsast. (The men came from the forest.) Englanti on mulle täyttä hepreaa. (English is completely Hebrew for me.)Englanti onkin heprea. (English actually is Hebrew.)
That's because lots of Finns make weekend trips to Tallinn to party and get drunk, and vice versa with Estonians coming to Helsinki. So when a Finn meets an Estonian, they are rarely both sober.
@@mike200017 I confirm that. My GF was Estonian and I met many drunk Finns both in Tallinn and Pärnu. Some of them even approached me talking in Finnish and I was like "whaaaaat?" :-D lol many of them would also buy stocks of alcohol in Estonia to take it back to Finland since it was cheaper :-D
As a foreigner living in Finland and trying to learn it, the only thing I can say is that there's a huge step between mastering written Finnish, the one you are taught, and oral Finnish. It's like two different languages, people use a different vocabulary, shortwords in replacement of every long word, contractions which you can't understand if nobody explained you before, simpler conjugation and every time I discussed about partitive to a Finnish, they almost ran away, even them find their grammar too complex. So, for a foreigner, it's hard because it's like having to learn two languages.
Finns run away because despite going through the grammar in school, most of us don't actually learn it. We just know it from learning as babes so trying to actually explain, nevermind actually give a reason why something is the way it is grammatically would be a nightmare to most.
I have immigrant co-workers that don't speak Finnish well. I always have to talk to them in written Finnish so they could understand me better. But I always tend to start speaking in the spoken Finnish because speaking so formaly using written language feels so slow. In spoken Finnish the words just effortlessly flow out of my mouth.
@@jokuvaan5175 that's so true, and frustrating at the same time for me as I make efforts to learn some rather strange grammar (to me) and when i find out natives don't speak like that, I feel like "hey, why don't I learn this simpler Finnish?"😁
@@Redgethechemist I guess the written is taught first so that you could actually read some legal documents etc. And every Finnish speaker can speak the written language if they just want to.
I'm a Dutch girl trying to learn Finnish (don't ask me why, I'm not certain either, but I like to do it, soo...) and I found this video very interesting. I love language as well, so you have a new subscriber!
We have a saying in Czech that could be translated as: "The more languages you learn, the more times you're a human." I am learning finnish too, even if I might not use it often, I do like to travel quite a bit, though. Learning languages is just an enjoyable hobby of mine and I like to learn more about other people in the world.
”Jos ajaisit hitaammin, niin pystyisin lukemaan karttaa.” -Normal (kindly asking, but f u) form ”Jospa ajaisit hitaammin, niin pystyisin lukemaan karttaa.” -Very subtle, slightly frustrated f u form ”Ajaisit hitaammin... pystyisin lukemaan karttaa” -Theatrical/old form. ”Jos ajaisit hitaammin... pystyisin lukemaan karttaakin.” -Friendly subtle f u form Ajasit hitaammin, niin pystysin lukeen karttaaki, perkele! -More modern not so subtle f u form Expressing the degree of your frustration is the core of Finnish language.
You can also say "laual" in Estonian, you don't need to use "laua peal", so the same structure can be used as in "pöydällä". Sorry, if somebody already mentioned it.
My experience as an Estonian from southern Estonia (meaning no Finnish TV as a child as the Finnish broadcast did not reach that far) now living in Finland for the second year: Before learning any Finnish, I understood basically nothing! I mean there are many basic words that are the same or similar (like ‘käsi’ - ‘hand’, ‘vesi’ - ‘water’), but that does not get you very far even for everyday language. I remember reading the warning label on the radiators saying ‘Ei saa peittää’ - ‘do not cover’. The meaning is quite obvious from the context, I mean what else would you need to write on a radiator? But in Estonian ‘Ei saa peita’ means ‘cannot be hidden’ (Is this a challenge? Sure it can! Let me show you! :D). Trying to read a newspaper, I would recognize a word here and there, but that’s about it. Of course I would understand the international words like ‘koronavirus’ and such, but Finnish uses a lot fewer international words than Estonian, so if a Finn knows any Swedish or German or even English, they would automatically know more words in Estonian than the other way around. Some examples from Estonian and Finnish: ‘sport’ - ‘urheilu’, ‘start’ - ‘lähtö’, ‘telefon’ - ‘puhelin’. Without specifically learning those words, an Estonian would not recognize them in Finnish. Now, while living in Finland and trying to learn Finnish almost every day, I can talk about simple concepts and things in Finnish but nothing complex really. I can understand perhaps 50-60% of newspaper articles, but only perhaps 30% from of everyday spoken Finnish (like listening to a Finnish conversation). The hardest part for me is the vocabulary. (Grammar is mostly similar.) Basically I need to learn completely new words that are unrelated to any other languages I know for everything! I can speak English, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian and basic German and I have to say that learning any of those other languages has been super easy compared to learning Finnish (even though I am Estonian!). Why so? Mostly because of very simple grammar (English, Swedish and Norwegian at least) and similar words in many of those languages. As mentioned in the video, Estonian has borrowed a lot of words from Low German and idiomatic expressions from High German, so in terms or words and expressions, those languages are (surprisingly) closer to Estonian than Finnish is! Also, I have noticed that it is easier for a Finn to learn Estonian, probably because they would recognize some words from multitude of Finnish dialects that are still in use today and others from Germanic languages (Swedish, German), that they have often learned previously. Estonian is much more standardized and I’d say most Estonians don’t know any dialects (which may be more similar to Finnish) apart from a few words here and there. Being able to speak English almost anywhere in Finland has unfortunately not helped me learn Finnish quicker. Even when some Finns have insisted on speaking Finnish, after they suffer through a few minutes of me trying to recollect some Finnish words, they usually give up and start speaking English to me :D.
Do not feel bad, my Friend. I studied French for 4 years in secondary school. Every time I have met a Francophone, they have asked me to please speak English.
Wow, this is an insteresting story. I'm proud of an Estonian studying MY language, since they're so similar. Anyway, I'm pretty sure you'll reach your goal of speaking Finnish (not fluently but enough for conversations). Spoken Finnish might be tricky, but you can start comparing spoken Finnish with written Finnish and see how similar they are and then memorize the shortenings and slight changes (for example: minä -> mä, olen -> oon)
No, kirjotit ton kommentin vuos sit. Oletan et su kielitaitos o paremp nykyää mut kiinnostaapaha mua se nyt silti. Pystyk ymmärtää mitä mää sano täs? 'Mein suomalaiste o mukava kuul mite ihmiset muual maast vaik iha naapuristaki o tulee suomee ja oppii tän kiele. Tosi moni nuar ei oikee kyl välit tai sit kirjaimmelist vaa haukkuu, ko kaik ei onnist, mu onha se ihanaa kuul kokemuksia täst opiskelust.' Pidä hyvä päivä! Täst saat myös ton tekstin kiejakielel, jos helpompaa! "Meidän suomalaisten on mukava kuulla miten ihmiset muualta maasta, vaikka ihan naapuristakin olisi, on tullut suomeen ja opiskelee tämän kielen. Tosi moni nuori ei oikein kyllä välitä tai sitten kirjaimellisesti vain haukkuu, kun kaikki ei onnistu, mutta onhan se ihanaa kuulla kokemuksia tästä opiskelusta."
3:47 there is an archaic word for evening in Finnish, called "ehtoo", which seems to be a cognate with the Estonian õhtu. But I don't think most Finns would pick it up in a conversation, unless they're already aware of the connection.
EHTOOTA! raipe 4.4.2010 ehtoo on synonyymi sanalle ilta. sanontaa käytetään kun moikataan kavereille,ja myös silloin kun mennään jonkun luo.Käytetään vuorokauden ajasta riippumatta myös aamuin,päivin ja öin. "Ehtoot!/Ehtot!" "Ehtooooota tupaan! "Ehtoot vaa!! ;D
I can tell that "ilta" is probably relative to Estonian word "hilja", what has lots of versions in local dialects like "ilda", and means "late". Not hard to see similar origin.
I didn't know Estonian had so much or even any significant German influnece. I knew that Estonia, Livonia and Couronia used to be ruled by baltic german nobles, but not that they had so much influence on the language of their subjects.
The Baltic Germans rarely bothered learning Estonian, so Estonian subjects probably had to learn a little German (and later, also Russian) to speak to their German rulers
@@zanderrose Well it makes some sense, they probably wanted the locals to assimliate in a similar way to what happend in Prussia(where the native Baltic "Old Prussians" got assimilated into German culture and language). It's probably good that this didn't happen, it's sad that old Prussian is not a language and people that exists anymore.
@@smuu1996 Estonian literacy wss forming during the baltic-german rule so yeah, they borrowed some stuff. Also I believe Prussians still exist but because there is no language, there is no nation
"Finnish and Estonian languages are so similiar" Finns when they hear Estonian: *confused screaming* Estonians when they hear Finnish: [visible confusion]
Not really. I'm Estonian and I can understand at least written Finnish in very broad strokes, having never learned it. Spoken language is a lot harder to understand, but depending on what's being said, if it's not super long or complicated, you could figure it out. And you can easily hold a fairly detailed conversation if each of the parties involved has SOME knowledge of the other language. I've seen people have Finnish-Estonian convos, one speaking Estonian, the other replying in Finnish, and it working fine. The absolute peak was once a couple on the bus who was debating US' economic sanctions on Iran. :D When I was little, we had a Finnish neighbour and that's how him and my parents would talk - one in Estonian, the other in Finnish. The prerequisite is some familiarity, of course, and being used to hearing those words spoken, as the pronunciation is often quite different. I've been generally told that for outsiders, Estonian sounds like fast Finnish :D.
Actually, its prpven that estonians understand finnish quite well, while fins seem to find it difficult to.comprehend estonian, sorry for the shitty grammar im wasted off my balls
@@Futu06 I wish you had been working in the hamburger restaurant in Tallinn that I visited once. I tried to simply order some food in Finnish, but the cashier could not understand me. Ultimately I had to make my order in English.
You left out the whole part regarding phonetics! Estonian is unique in having 3 distinctive lengths for both vowels and consonants (lina/linna/linnna). And also interesting consonant alternations in the declension of nouns.
Well, Finnish has two lengths in both vowels and consonants like: tuli (fire), tuuli (wind), tulli (border control) But Estonian not only has one more length but also vowels and consonant clusters us Finns don't have. This is why we tend to understand written Estonian much better than spoken.
It's interesting that even though Finnish is the conservative one, to Finns Estonian words often sound quite archaic. For example: Mother = ema 🇪🇪 / äiti 🇫🇮 Finnish also has the word "emä" but it's only used of animals these days. It's also used in words like emakko 🇫🇮 = a sow Raincoat = vihmamantel 🇪🇪/ sadetakki 🇫🇮 Finnish has the words "vihma" (drizzle) and "mantteli" (overcoat), but no one uses the latter word anymore. (this is one of my favourite Estonian words btw) Evening = õhtu 🇪🇪 / ilta 🇫🇮 Finnish has the word "ehtoo", but once again, it sounds really archaic. Also because Finns have used some of these loans like "telefoni" and "köökki" (kitchen) before, but not anymore (they can be used in some dialects though), they also sound old-fashioned to Finns nowadays. Not to diss either language, this is just something I find interesting! :)
It's pretty common in a lot of language families for advancing languages to retain some archaic and traditional words and phrases. English, despite being more "innovative" in the sense of being more universally accessible than something like German has a lot of old Germanic vocabulary not used today in other languages. Words like king, town, and twilight (literally "two-light") have changed very little in the past 1,000 years yet these can't be found in common use in other languages like German or Dutch. I don't even need to get into all the Old Norse vocabulary in English. German is still way more conservative than English though, especially in grammar.
Both languages' speakers can hear archaic words in the other language, which have become rare or disappeared in their own language. ALso the other language might use still the old word you recognize, but your language might have replaced it with a loan word from a third language.
Yeah, it's interesting. Also what I've heard from finns and noticed myself as an estonian is that our languages feel like grammarly incorrect to each other.
@@maxim9280 Dear Maxim. Estonia is our friend for they are the only Finno -branch, of Finno-Ugric nations, beside Finland, free from russian submission. That is why, dear Maxim, they are our friends.
@@ninaakari5181 Going from Tallinn to Helsinki doesn't feel like going abroad. Most everything is still intelligible, it's just written in a funny way. I'd like to see schools teaching more Finnish in Estonia, as it's a shame, that we have to revert to English to communicate despite both being Finnic. Regardless, it's good to see that there are still warm feelings between the two people.
As a Hungarian I find that Finnish and Estonian are quite alike. I also see the more ancient connection between my own language and both of these. You can feel how astonishingly far back in time this connection takes us once a Hungarian gets more acquianted with either one of these languages, the differences being a factor of the passing time.
Szia! i can’t understand anything (finnul, észtül) suchlike phrase ”egy szép lányt láttam a házban” (yhden sievän tytön näin talossa) but translate (fordílás=käännös) and changing lány> nö (wrong ö)=neito,neiu and näin> vaattasin, vahtasin. Of course ház= talo, maja. Too much different words. Some suffixes are easy (🤔) to explain Saksas,Saksassa= Németországon. Saksamaal, saksanmaalla= németországban. Észtországban, Finnországban…(vagy,või,vai 🫤)well in this case nem tudom, en tiedä, ma ei tea
@@markusmakela9380 Hei! Yes these differences show the amount of time that separates the two languages. The same sentence in English and French or Greek won't be intelligible either, because Germanic and Latin and Greek languages seem to have separated a long time ago, although they are all Indo-European and had later a lot of interchange: "I saw a beautiful girl in the house" (French: "J'ai vu une belle fille dans la maison"; Greek with English letters: "Ida ena omorfi koritisi stin spiti"). The correspondence between Hungarian and Finnish can be seen mostly in the regular sound-shifts of basical words, like fej-pää, hal-kala.
usually everything is finnish like számitogép= tietokone (tudja-gép) , but sometimes we use ironically (sarcastic way) aslike there would be ”loanword” kompuutterinpaska ( ”shitty computer”; számítogépszár. Have you Magyarországon any ”sarcastic” loanword (btw. the bus, a busz= linja-auto, (onnikka, very old word) and in Tampere (Däbrätsä of Finland) they use word ”nysse” ( ny se tulee=now it coming) everyday. (Debrecen pronouncing hears to us däbrätsä 🤔
I'm an Estoninan and moved to Finland 2,5 years ago. It took about one month to learn Finnish on the level of communicating and getting a job. For now I feel I'm forgetting a bit of Estonian grammar and I'm morfing two languages (depends which one I'm speaking).
Hearing how phonetically similar they are, it is understandable. It's not like Swedish and Norwegian , that uses very different fonology, making it easier to hold separate in your head.
@Amirr33 They are not always mutually inteligable. There are many false friends and the split of West Norse and East Norse languages does create some grammatical difference. (West Norse: Norwegian, Faroeian, Icelandic. East Norse: Danish, Swedish, Geatish)
I (a Finn) got surprised how much I can understand Estonian when I started learning some Estonian. I didn't continue to study Estonian. I can read Estonian news and understand what an article is about. But I probably would have some problems understanding some parts. I watched a part of Eesti Laul 2020 final and understood most of what the hosts were saying. If I have had more exposure to the Estonian language, I probably would understand more of it. I think I could have simple conversations in Estonian with my current skills, but I probably wouldn't always know for sure if a word is the same in Estonian and Finnish. I think my understanding is much better than my conversation skills in Estonian. I probably should study more Estonian, when I have time for it because I travel to Estonia quite often. And there I have noticed that some Finns (not me) just "rudely" speak Finnish to Estonians and assume that they understand all of what they're saying. You really have made an amazing work for this video. Great job, Paul!
That's what I've been saying. The languages are much more similar than they initially appear and with a little exposure you can understand surprisingly much. I haven't properly studied Estonian, but I have looked up some song translations through the years and checked some words from dictionary when I've been unsure of the meaning. With some effort I can read Estonian newspapers and even watch Estonian television programs. I don't understand all of it, but enough to get the general idea what people are talking about (most of the time).
I've definetly had some limited conversations with my friends' friends where they were speaking finnish and i was speaking estonian. Understanding the topic of a conversation isn't too difficult (at least if you have had some exposure) but really speaking it is ofcourse another story
En oikein ymmärrä Viroa melkein yhtään. Kun olimme Tallinnassa katottiin virolaisia uutisia, ja me kaikki sanottiin koko ajan "mun pitäis ymmärtää, mutta mä vaan en". Enkö oikein ymmärrä koska olen nuori, en ole ollut Virossa tarpeeksi, en lue Viroa ja olen suomenruotsalainen? (Vau, Mim. Toi oli typerä kysymys.)
There are multiple permutations of the word order that are all correct, but then the stress or tone of the sentence might slightly change. For example, at 14:39 , if you change the order of "you would drive" and "more slowly", it would put more stress on "more slowly" and might sound a bit passive-aggressive. If you do the same switch in the second part of the sentence, it's still correct, but just awkward without any undertone. But i suppose so, yes. It doesn't make it any easier for me to understand Yoda though.
When I volunteered in Estonia, I couldn't hear the difference between Estonian (spoken by locals) and Finnish (spoken by tourists) first. It only came with the experience that sometimes I could understand words and phrases, then later on I noticed the real differences.
In general Foreigners tend to learn grammar rules better than Finns :D Im a native Finnish speaker... but I couldnt give any Grammar tips, due all complicated rules are learned with Ear.
Sadly, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are the only Uralic languages which are spoken by many people and have literature. Sami languages and the other Uralic languages have gone extinct or are part of a very small group of people which is why there is not a lot of research available.
I would love to see this type of video for Latvian and Lithuanian! They're in a very similar situation to these two. Two closely related languages, only slightly mutually intelligible, one evolved more and the other stayed more traditional. Except I'd say even though they are supposed to be very similar, from a Latvian's perspective it feels like Lithuanian is somewhere between Latgalian and Russian.
Lithuanian is based on Aukstaitian which is very similar to Latgalian. As far as I know Latvian is based not on Latgalian but on western tribes (Curonians, Semigallians?) and thus is similar to Samogitian. Also Lithuanian has huge Polish (not Russian) influence, while Latvian has huge Germanic, Livonian and Russian influence. Lithuanian has no Germanic influence. Due to different history since 1200s. Thus Lithuanians and Latvians do not understand each other.
@@eglepegle7037 I'm pretty sure Latvian is mainly based on the Vidzeme dialect since I think that's the most similar dialect to the literary language. But yeah, I'd guess it's mainly based on influence from different languages. I know Latvian got its first syllable accent from the Finnic languages like Estonian and Livonian, as well as several other things probably. That's cool tho, thanks for the info.
@@VSaccount I guess it makes sense, Lithuanian is closer to the Slavic countries and Latvian has had quite a lot of influence from Livonian, a language from the same language family as Estonian and Finnish, but which is now extinct basically.
Yeah, I noticed stuff like this a couple times during the video. Oftentimes the Estonian word is reminiscent of a rarely used archaic or poetic synonym of a Finnish word. Really interesting, and intuitive when you think about the languages' shared history.
My mother tongue is English language but after learning Estoniam I had an interesting experience when visiting Finland where Swedish language is also an official language. When reading sign posts I was initially misled by Swedish with instructions which appeared very English but actually meant something else I found it more useful to figure out Finnish language instruction through Estonian 😯👍
You don't need to go to school, when there is Paul's channel around! Have you ever heard in school talking about Finnish and Estonian? At least I haven't.
cool fact about finnish and estonia Estonia= Ma koristan ruumis Finnish= Minä siivoan huoneessa translating Estonian sentence to Finnish = I am decorating a dead body
Yeah, somwhere on the Internet I saw a photo of some snowy area with forest that looked almost black and the blue sky above it. The photo was compared to estonian flag and to this day I use it to remember the colours of the flag. Love the comparison and estonian flag is indeed pretty 😊
It is a lot more common to use the contraction "laual" instead of "laua peal", they mean the exact same thing in context. That minor comment asside this is a very neat video for a native Estonian speaker who is conversational in Finnish. Picked up Finish from relatives across the bay and from weekend morning cartoons in the 90's and 00's.
It's also possible to say "pöydän päällä" in Finnish, but it's similarly less common. Apart from that, it was indeed interesting to learn about the differences.
Yeah, and in Finnish people use both "pöydällä" and "pöydän päällä" without any real preference. Also if the object is large, you always use the word "päällä" instead, for example you wouldn't say "On the house" by using the form "Talolla" but instead it's "Talon päällä".
@@wardeni9603 Neat. In Estonian though don't recall ever hearing "Maja peal" unless it refers to the roof, instead it's usually "Katusel" or "Katuse peal", both mean on the roof. The use of "Majal" to mean on top of the house similarly doesn't happen though, "Majal" is only used to describe ap roperty the house has, at least in the dialect I speak.
@@antikristuseke Yeah, that's true, people do usually say "katolla" / "Katon päällä" (On the roof) rather than "on the house". But I just used that as an example, perhaps "on the hill" etc. would have made more sense as an example xD
What a well-researched presentation. And I was impressed that you can roll the Finnish R like a pro. BTW, the Finnish word for "to learn" (around 12:30) should be oppia (not opia). It's that pesky consonant gradation.
It's a very hard task, especially if you want to include hungarian. At this point the only similarities between hungarian and finnic languages are words related to nature, the languages haven't had direct contact for a few thousand years
I am a Finn and I undestand Estonian very well, it is my second best language. I learned it first as a kid watching children's programs in Estonian TV and later I learned more by listening a lot to Estonian radio channels and by reading books in Estonian.
I grew up watching german cartoons on TV cuz estonian shows were boring to me. Estonian media IMO is dull and boring. Estonia is my native language so i didnt need to watch my shows.
I acted as a rally co-driver to an Estonian friend.. We ended up with a super hybrid form of both languages. But the end result was crashes upon crashes as we would die out of laughter when speaking :p (Not in real life though but in a game)
the grammar is honestly not that different from indo european. Just more cases and post positions. Russian also has a 2 infinitive system with more cases than German e.g. I find Estonian easier than Chinese. (Prettier, too, and I find Cantonese very beautiful).
In my experience as a native Finn when i started learning Estonian it all seemed so easy and before long i thought i know alot but as i got the hang of it a bit more it occured to me how different these two languages really are. Yet so much in common that it makes the learning process harder because these two sometimes mix up in your head and you end up forming sentences in Finstonian. So if these languages were just a bit closer to each other or a bit further the learning would be easier. Anyway..just my opinion..anyone agree?
I have the same problem learning Polish being a Ukrainian speaker. Both languages have similarities and it makes it hard to learn since you would end up mixing words
I have to say that many Estonian words like "Tere" are e.g. Used in one of the Finnish dialects called Tampereen dialect. I personally live in Tampere and it is common for people to say “tere, tere, miten menee? ” and also the word “Tere tulemast vaan” is very common and everyone understands. Although it is quite directly from the Estonian language ofcourse . Many do not understand it either where its coming from. I have worked with Estonian workers and I noticed that I understood very well what they were talking about, because there was always like one word in each sentence that was very close to Finnish. we laughed whenever I could comment on something in Finnish and they often understood what I said. I think it's great that we have such a close neighbor next door, because even though we have shared a lot of history with Swedish, Swedish is far from Finnish language and many Finns are not very eager to learn it.
As an Estonian who's living in Finland I can say some similarities in languages are surprising. Even slang and expressions have a lot of similarities. Also one thing completely missed by this video is the difference in pronouncing g,b,d k,p,t or kk,pp,tt in the languages. Finnish is softer in pronouncing them. Interestingly enough, although both languages are said to be read as you write. Meaning each letter is always pronounced the same way. The way you pronounce it in the corresponding alphabet, it is not entirely true, especially for Estonian. One main difficulty for Fins pronouncing Estonian words is that we don't mark down softenings for letters. A lot of Estonians don't even notice we have two pronunciations for example for N, S or L. Example: word "kann" in Estonian has three meanins and two pronunciations. The word can mean "a jug" without softening the N. Or "a doll/a toy"(older word) or "a butt cheek"(shortened word from "kannikas") while the N is softened. Softening to my knowledge does not exist in Finnish, As much as I've discussed this matter with Finnish friends.
@@ericjohnson6634 The prononciation changes like if you add "b" thingy next to a letter than can be "softened". Otherwise it is still written as heared, the letter stays the same and no additional changes are done in Estonian.
I studied in Tallinn for a couple of years (Bachelors), and once said to my Estonian class mates that Estonian sounds a bit like fairy-language to us Finns (quite fast, very "bouncing" on the intonation). One of them replied that Finnish sounds a bit like a dwarven language coming from under ground :D That's my favourite description of the two languages
Since they diverged 2000 years ago, it's amazing how many similarities remain! I mean, even 1000 year-old English is barely recognizable, and 2000 years ago French wasn't even a glint in Latin's eye. :^>
Old English is recognisable if you live in Britain but modern English is not derived directly from old English, it is derived from Anglo-Norse which was the dialects spoken in the Viking half of England. That language was heavily influenced by Scandinavian Northern Germanic and it was the language spoken in london 200 years after the Normans reinstated English as the official language by then old English was dying out or changing to Middle English although the dialects were dupifferent. Most of central, eastern and northern England spoke Anglo Norse dialects influenced either by Danish or West Norwegian hence the reason why English grammar ppand syntax, as well as numerals and day of the week are almost entirely derived from Old Norse and not old English if it had been old English modern English would sound very much like Dutch and German and not the hybrid West-North germanic language that it is today. According toe CIA world book the easiest language for an English speaker to learn is Norwegian. Although most people don’t know that because no one has to learn Norwegian. But it is actually true
@@prospektarty1513 Yup, as much as we can list the influences, and the contributors to Modern English, the journey to get here was not linear! Before modern communications and transportation, Britain was linguistically a diverse place, with diverse foreign influences on the language - and of course the line dividing for the Danelaw made Northern English fairly distinct for many centuries. Old English has considerable similarities with Icelandish, and even more with the dwindling West Frisian (still spoken in the Frise area of The Netherlands). I don't know if I'd want to delve into Norwegian; which form would you even learn: Bokmal or Nynorsk?
The rhythm of changes is not the same from one language to another. Some languages change faster than others, some languages are conservative and change more slowly, like Finnish and Icelandic for example.
@@vexator19 Speed of linguistic evolution is pretty directly related to the frequency of interaction with other cultures, I think. However: whether interactions were frequent or not, 2 millennia is a _l-o-n-g_ time!
Fascinating! I’m a New Yorker who has sung in an Estonian choir 5+ years, most of the time trying to learn how to pronounce Estonian (especially õ). I learned a lot from this video - it’ll help me if my chorus survives this pandemic.
Paul, your videos always leave me speechless in terms of how well and thoughtfully prepared they are. Watching them, I end up being interested in every single foreign language out there, Finnish and Estonian included of course. I love the sound of both, even if they are far away from my linguistic "port". Thank you for yet another wonderfully inspiring video!
Tere! Having only spent a few days in Estonia and Finland, I cannot tell the two languages apart yet. I love how they sound anyway, and I wish I could learn one of them one day... I’d probably go for Estonian, since I really loved my stay there 😊
I am Estonian and Finnish sounds like very archaic Estonian language. Finns still use some words that Estonians stopped using centuries ago ("heinakuu" and "susi", for example).
I speak quite fluent Finnish and I can say same. For example finnish "kuolema" that means to die, is also koolema in Estonian, but usually elder people use that word. Also Southern Estonian dialects sounds sometimes like Finnish and some words are even same.
@@avroraaspasia7214 okolet kuolema koolema, are you sure finnic languages loaned the word from russian and not vice versa? Or If they just share common ancestor? You cant really know for sure on all words unless you have a time machine...
If you look into Proto-Finnic vocabulary, Finnish words are often identical or very similar, while Estonian words have usually changed a lot more. And then both of them have kept "kuningas" almost unchanged since they borrowed it from Proto-Germanic *kuningaz some 2000 years ago xD
I lived for several years in Estonia, learned the language (though cannot say that I'm really fluent) and forever got a soft spot in my heart for those pine forests on the seashore and medieval spires of Tallinn.. Armas Eesti, väga igatsen sinu järele. I remember that funny moment, when I first heard Finnish. It was in a bus in Tallinn, when I already started learning Estonian and intently listened for what people are speaking around :) And I was desperate that I barely could understand anything the couple next to me was talking about before realizing, that probably they were speaking Finnish. Indeed, Finnish pronunciation is different, and with some experience it is not difficult to distinct between the two even if you speak neither. And a few remarks about the content: 1) The funniest 'false friend' is probably the word 'hallitus', which means 'mold' in Estonian and 'board of directors' in Finnish :) 2) Besides of 'laua peal' in Estonian you could use addessive 'laual', which is similar to Finnish usage. 3) The verb 'ajama' for 'to drive' also exists in Estonian, though it is not used in the sense of driving a car - rather like driving a herd of cattle.
In Finnish you can also say "pöydän päällä" if you want to give more emphasis to the fact that it's on top of the table or just want to use a longer form. Adessive is also used to mean "by means of" and "in the vicinity of", so genitive + "päällä" can be useful for disambiguation as well. By the way, laud (which research tells me is the nominative of laua) seems to be another false friend: Finnish lauta means plank.
Also, instead of ”minä luin kirjan”, you can say ”luin kirjan läpi” which is the same as ”lugesin raamatu läbi”, if we go into spoken finnish and then finnish dialects, you will see almost everything is connected in finnish and estonian
I am just so amazed, Paul about your breadth and depth of linguistics and language. Listening to your discussion of different cases, tenses, adverbs and assorted other sentence descriptors just defies simple comprehension. Left in the dust is the best way to think about my understanding of all this, and I can just about make myself understood in only about 3 languages. Kudos to you.
As an expat living in Estonian and who learns the language, and knows something about Finnish (because Happoraadio, Moonsorrow, and others), I say that, while the two languages sound very similar, it's still possible to tell one from the other on the streets, even on a low level (I'm currently A1~A2 in vocabulary, and B1 in grammar). I've heard Finns talking in Tartu (south-eastern Estonia), and they would always finish (no pun intended) the words with -ssa/ä or -la/ä (when the respective cases are necessary). That makes it possible to tell when someone is speaking Finnish. Also, vowel harmony helps, too. Not gonna lie though, I'm kinda disappointed you didn't talk about examples like "ruumis🇫🇮 on ruumis🇪🇪" in the false friends section. Finnish 'ruumis' is "corpse", while Estonian 'ruumis' is "in the room" (inessive case of ruum), and "on" is the verb to-be, conjugated in the 3rd person singular (or plural, but not in this case). As usual, great video :)
As Estonian I can tell, there are even stranger false friends. "hallitus🇫🇮" means "government", but "hallitus🇪🇪" means "mold". And "pulma🇪🇪" means illative case of "marriage", but "pulma🇫🇮" means "trouble". 🤣
Finnish is such an awesome language. I'm sure Estonian is too, but I don't know a lick of Estonian, so I can't comment lol The entire Uralic language family seems very interesting, definitely marked by beautifully complex grammar. Would you mind doing a video about Nenets? Your videos are great, very informative!
15:34 Including the word "niin" in formal or written text is one of the reasons my grammar teacher would mark my essays using a bright red pen as a sign of a grammatical error 😅 "Niin" is abundant in subordinate clauses in spoken Finnish, but considered often an error (and redundant) in formal speech/text. I don't persoonally find it odd at all to leave it out in this particular case. Excellent job with these videos - I'm a long-time subscriber 💪😎👍
Can't say the same for our other Finno-Ugric brethren in Russia. They are being russified to extinction. If the Slavs didn't migrate here, almost the entirety of modern-day Russia would be Finno-Ugric.
The finnish language is spoken exactly like it is written, there are no hidden ways to pronounce things. "Extremely" is a word where every "e" is pronounced differently. There are multiple ways to pronounce most letters in english, but in finnish, every letter has a specific sound it makes, so it's extremely simple. Except "c", which can be "s", "k" or "sh", mostly used in loan words. As long as you learn the sounds to make for every letter, you can read a book written in finnish out loud, without knowing the words, and you would pronounce every single one correctly.
As a Finnish learner and German L2-speaker I really became intrigued to also take up Estonian after watching your presentation. I mean, Finnic vocabulary and grammar with a Germanic flavour and verb-final syntax on the subordinate clauses: that sounds just awesome! Excellent work, thanks for offering us such amazing videos!
For the "Hyvää iltaa"/"Tere õhtust" I might just add that Finnish does still have the word "ehtoo", meaning "evening", which is cognate with the Estonian word.
Paul J. Morton yeah, direct translation from Estonian would roughly be ”tervettä ehtoota” which would mean ”healthy evening to you”. Understandable in Finnish, but slightly archaic and funny sounding. I’m sure there are local dialects in e.g. Germany and Italy which are about as far from each other as are Estonian and Finnish.
@@DirtyMardi Yeah there's plenty of words in Estonian that to us Finns sound archaic another example would be the word for "summer" in Estonian which is "suvi" which in Finnish also means "summer" but is very archaic and mostly used as a female name (the typical Finnish word for "summer" is "kesä").
@@SampoPaalanen In Turku dialect and some other western dialects especially older people use suvi more than kesä. Most of written and hence officialized finnish was based on western dialect since Turku was the capital city back then. Ilta and kesä are exceptions to this rule. They're words of originally eastern dialect that won over their western counterparts.
As a Finnish speaker, Estonian is such an interesting language to me. If someone were to talk Estonian to me, I probably wouldn't understand much, but when I see the two written next to each other all the similarities and changed words are so obvious and honestly quite amusing.
A Latvian here! I actually was quite surprised that there are so many similarities to Latvian language, considering that Latvian is an Indo-European language. (more info below) The words and phrases are different, but you can definitely see common roots. Sorry I am not differentiating below between Estonian and Finnish, but the first one is Latvian in each case. Māja - Maja - House, kūts - Hütt - Hut, Grāmata - Raamat - Book, Ārsts - Arst - Doctor, Apgūt - Õppige - To learn, Lasīt - Loe - To read, Augstskola - Ülikool - University, Ja - Jos - If, Sākt - Hakkan - Start, Karte - Kartaa - Map, And even if we are looking at sentences, then in Latvian a sentence: "I read a book" would be: "Es lasu grāmatu" But you can definitely add "labi" at the end of that sentence to reassure that it's well read, so this works, just not commonly used anymore: "Es lasu grāmatu labi" And even "Es" in a different conjugation is "Man" which is similar to "Ma", so people don't speak like this, but you could say. :D "Man lasu grāmatu labi" And in Estonian that sentence was shown as: "Ma lugesin raamatu läbi". Though I was surprised at some differences, that there are no genders and time is determined just by the context.
Latvian was also influenced by German, just like Estonian. Another reason for some similarities might be that in Latvian, there are a few words that have originally been loaned from the old Livonian language, which is related to Estonian and Finnish, isn't that so?
As an Estonian - thank you for the video, very interesting indeed. I was born in 92, as I grew up interest and need towards Finnish TV was already declining as we regained our independence. But it is true, a lot of people got to grips with Finnish. Nowadays young Estonians know English as a second language because of western infulence. To me Finnish always sounded a bit round and soft compared to the more edgy Estonian pronounciations. But that is obviously not always true, more of a feeling.
You didn’t mention Õ (and the lack of Õ in Finnish)! Also, I’m horrified of the idea that Finnish has FIVE infinitives! 😲 I have always had trouble explaining why we need even two... (I don’t think the difference can be explained by just the certain-not certain rule).
Actually some those 4 of 5 are present in Estonian, but only 2 considered as infinitives. 1st FIN is EST da-infinitive. istua = istuda 2nd FIN is EST des-form. tehdessä = tehes. 3rd FIN is EST ma-infinive. tekemään = tegema. tekemässä = tegemas. tekemästä = tegemast. tekemättä = tegemata. pitää tekemän = peab tegema. Only tekemällä has no direct counterpart in EST. 4th FIN is EST mine-form. tekeminen = tegemine 5th FIN has no counterpart in EST.
@@aleksandrmuravja9341 Could tekemällä be translated as EST tegemaks? (not widely used, sounds bureaucrat, but definitely exists. My Finnish isn't good, but I get the feeling it's "needed to [do], as in EST "tegemaks korrektuure = to make corrections" or EST "nägemaks pean avama silmad = to see I need to open my eyes"
@@mirjam3553 Sometimes can be used, but in general not. EST nägemaks = FIN näkemiseksi. I found this explanation: mällä-vorm kasutatakse juhul, kui vastame küsimustele: Mil viisil? ja Kuidas? --- We use mällä-vorm to answer question: How? ex: By going something. For example: FIN Syntymällä saa lapsi kansalaisuuden, jonta äiti on Suomen kansalainen. EST Sünniga omandab Soome kodakondsuse laps, kelle ema on Soome kodanik. ENG Child gets Finnish citizenship by birth, if his mother is Finland citizen.
Hungarian has 7 infinitives. One "basic" infinitive and one for each person and number. So the infinitive can be conjugated. Turkish and Kazakh has a similar feature.
What do you think of sung Finnish (?? weird phrasing, Mim)? Jenni Vartiainen's _missä muruseni on_ is an incredible song and she sings it in the most beautiful Finnish ever! Well, all of her songs I'm pretty sure, has her sing in the most hypnotic and incredible Finnish.
The attention to detail and quality of this clip is truly awesome, even if i just scratches the topic. Very, very pleased to see such effort being made. Thank you! I am a native Estonian speaker, never formally learned Finnish, travel to Finland often. Cannot really understand Finnish, much less speak it, but I feel like after every trip it becomes closer.
I'm a Finn who has studied Estonian a little bit and I find the false friends very interesting and funny too. The worst false friend that I've come across has to be the word raiskata/raiskama. It means 'to waste' in Estonian but 'to rape' in Finnish. Although the meaning 'to waste' exists in Finnish too but it's very rare. One could say for example "älä raiskaa metsää" which means 'don't waste the forest'. Usually we Finns think about raping though if we hear the word since 'to rape' is the most common meaning. Another word that Finns and Estonians have to be careful with is halpa/halb. The Finnish halpa means 'cheap' but the Estonian halb means 'bad'. I've heard some unlucky stories about Finnish people telling Estonians that they have cheap coffee and Estonians getting upset because they have understood that the coffee is bad. The funniest false friend that I know is hallitus, which means 'government' in Finnish but 'mold' in Estonian. I guess this is because the words have different roots. The Finnish hallitus comes from the verb hallita which means 'to control/to rule' but the Estonian hallitus might come from the word hall which means 'grey'.
This reminded me that the grey seal has two names in Finnish: halli or harmaahylje. The name halli clearly has the same origin as the Estonian word for grey. Halli is also an old word or name for a dog, presumably a grey one.
@@Ulrich_dArth Casinos aren't a "thing" at least in Finland, not really. It's highly monopolized and controlled. There are slot machines absolutely everywhere, but true "casino" games like Poker, Blackjack? I know a single venue in Finland that sometimes hosts those, and the people involved are "professional" gamblers. So culturally, Finnish at least lacks any sort of Casino-related idioms or sayings. Instead: Most "gamblers" are regular shmos playing those slot machines, and it's highly addictive. And highly addictive personalities are not a good match with easy gambling opportunities. It's considered a problem; gambling addiction. Something very serious and not easily made fun of. Most of the people don't actually have the sort of money they play, which can ruin their entire lives. I'm sure there are sayings related to that, but i've never seen anything even slightly resembling humorous. More like lamenting the fact that some people suffer. When they made it possible to play using your credit / debit card, i literally shook my head: They know it's a problem, and they want it to remain so they can profit from it.
I used to learn Estonian, and I loved it! This video might be a call for me to pick up Estonian again. Thanks to your explanation, I now realize how interesting the language actually is. To me, Finnish and Estonian sound deceptively similar purely judging on their sounds, with Finnish exhibiting longer and more native words (like you mentioned that it's more conservative). I love that Finnish is being more conservative, but that also makes its grammar appear more complicated, at least to me. I find Estonian just nice, not too overwhelming, quite easy to understand its grammar considering that I had to learn it myself as it's a very rare language, many people haven't heard about it. Even Finnish lessons are impossible to find in SEA. Unfortunately, I don't know enough Estonian to help me understand Finnish, perhaps someday when I get better with Estonian, then I might try out Finnish, otherwise I get mixed up very easily.
Cases are probably the hardest thing in Finnish, but it simpler than many languages in some other ways. Pronounciation is almost exactly the same as writing, there are no genders, word order is often not essential for the meaning of a sentence etc. The reason it seems complicated is that it is not related to the well known languages, although there are a lot of germanic loans.
I don't think the number of cases is the main source of complexity in Estonian case system. Most of these function as English prepositions and are fixed suffixes added to genitive stem with no special cases. Learning all the Latin case names for them seems unneeded imo, it would be more natural to remember the corresponding questions that also end with these suffixes: Genitive kelle?/mille? whose?/which? kellel?/millel? on whom?/ on what? kelles?/milles? in whom? / in what? kellega?/millega? with whom? / with what? .... However, there is no one to one correspondence with English prepositions and Estonian cases. As an Estonian I often have some trouble figuring out what preposition to use. And genitive and partitive cases are VERY irregular and also have their interplay with plural form. Partitive could be especially difficult for English speakers as it often uses overlong syllables: having to make non-native phonetic distinctions (that are not spelled out in writing where genitive and partitive can look the same) to make non-native grammatic distinctions.
Thanks Paul for a great video again! Finnish is my language but many years ago I studied some Estonian. However, my ability to understand Estonian is limited. I think exposure to the language may be sufficient to learn. There are a lot of Estonian people working in Finland and I think they master Finnish well with relatively small amount of formal study. Dialectical differences in Finland are substantial. I come from southwestern part of Finland, where the local dialect is influenced by Estonian. I found fascinating, for exmple, that a sentence "Koer on köögis" is the same in my dialect and Estonian. In standard Finnish it is "Koira on keittiössä = The dog is in the kitchen."
I'm a Finn and Estonian is super easy (since I speak Swedish and German as well so the loan words and grammatical differences are clear) to understand. The hardest thing is the õ-sound.
Swedish and (especially) German helps so much in understanding Estonian. I'm not sure how much being fluent in Finnish actually helps beyond the first baby steps, very quickly you come across grammatical differences (this video was a great help with that, actually) and this plethora of false friends. Another thing to watch out for as a (very casual) learner is that Estonian writing is not as phonetic as Finnish writing; you won't get as good an approximation of how to pronounce something from the written form as you will with Finnish. Luckily Estonians are very forgiving when it comes to foreigners mangling their language :-) (I don't know if this is different if you are very obviously Finnish, ie trying to supplement with Finnish words.)
I'm an Estonian and took a semester of Finnish last year. I'd say Finnish is rather easy to grasp for us, aside from those many, many annoying "false friends" in both vocabulary and in grammar. Also the fact that the Estonian-based Finnish course at my university is supposed to take you to level B2 in two semesters, but the English-based one takes you to A1 in the same time, speaks for itself. You learn pretty quickly that "talo" in Finnish is "house", not farm (talu) and that "hallitus" is not a fungus, but their government. What was extremely difficult for me, though, was getting used to that the Finnish -ssa/-ssä (incessive case..?) and -lla/-llä (adessive case?) suffixes are not the same as the Estonian -se and -le suffixes. For example, "in the yogurt" in Finnish would be "jogurtissa", but in Estonian it would be "jogurtis", not "jogurtisse" (into the yogurt), which I would default to in speech, because they just sound more similar. This makes for weird sentences where instead of going to the shop (menen kauppaan) I am "going inside" the shop (menen kaupassa), which doesn't make any sense in neither English nor Finnish. This is just one example of many "false friends" in grammar. Before taking the class, though, I wouldn't say I could understand Finnish. With some mental effort I could understand the theme of some Finnish text, but not any specifics. Even today, I need to translate every other word or so to get a detailed overview of, say, a news article. Also fun fact, some say Finnish is more similar to Southern Estionian dialects such as Setu/Seto and Võru/Võro, which are spoken in regions much further away from Finland, than standard Estonian itself. I don't speak the dialect so I cannot confirm this myself.
I can wholeheartedly subscribe to the false friends, remember when I went to Tartu for a company meeting and after all was said and done went for a walk wanting to buy something to eat. So of course I wonder into Rimi buy couple of pastries and what at the time I thought was sour milk but later turned out to be just regular milk... *piim* does not equal *piimä*
Could it be that those Southern Estonian dialects are closer to that now extinct language of Livonian? Somehow livonian sounds similar to Finnish, although very much unintelligible. As a native speaker from South-Western Finland (Ala-Satakunta) I got my Aha-moment when someone explained that Ehtoo = Õhtust. I can also affirm that Suvi = Kesä = Summer. Those two words (evening = ehtoo = õhtust and Summer =suvi) are not actually in any way archaic in Turku region. Estonian has a very beautiful sound!
Im estonian and kull means owl in estonia so when i was in finland on a trip with many people i saw a owl and screamed kull...so yee everyone thought there was a pp on the tree
Hii! No, kull does not mean owl. The way to say owl is öökull (öö as in night and kull I think is a diff animal, idk) and the way to pronounce ö is like saying [ohh] in a coughing manner. [Oohh-ku-ll] or that's how I say it. Hope that helps!
@@maple9523 Kull is a general flavour of bird of prey, usually non-coastal. (Eagles, hawks, what have you. As most folk-y names, you don't _really_ need the species-level distinction day-to-day) Owls are öökull, indeed, but I can see a group of Finns getting exited over the 'kull' and entirely forgetting about the 'öö' :D
I'm not Estonian, I'm actually American, but I like seeing countries like Estonia being talked about, because many people don't even know they exist and maybe it's the language lover in me, but there's always more to learn :)
I think that over hear in Europe most people know Estonia as a country. Pointing it on a map might be a bit of a challenge, but I think most Europeans know the country by name.
Thanks for saying that! As an Estonian with American relatives, I always appreciate when someone from such a huge country from the other side of the Atlantic shows love for our small republic's culture/language :)
There are also some phonetic differences. - Estonian has one more vowel, õ. Example pronunciation at 3:44. Finnish y and Estonian ü are the same sound. - Estonian has three phoneme lengths: short, half-long, overlong. Finnish has two: short and long. - While it may seem that Estonian uses a lot more voiced consonants, that’s not actually true. Because Estonian has three phoneme lengths, they need a way to differentiate between them in writing. Because real voiced consonants are rare/nonexistent in Estonian, they use b, g, and d to mark the short length of p, k, and t (example “lugesin” and “läbi” at 10:57. Notice how Paul mispronounces “läbi” with a voiced consonant at 11:20.). A single p, k, t is a half-long consonant (again 10:57, “raamatu”), and a double pp, kk, tt is an overlong consonant (example 6:24).
@@seneca983 Short is one letter, halflong and overlong are both two letters. You have to know which is which word-by-word (or in some cases, declension-by-declension) basis.
@@seneca983 Yes. For example, “kool” (school) has half long oo in “kooli” (genitive) declension, but overlong in “kooli” (partitive). Go to sonaveeb.ee (an Estonian web dictionary), search for “kool”, then click on the audio buttons under “sõnavormid” to hear the difference. AFAIK, Estonians can infer from context what was meant even if we foreigners pronounce the length wrong.
As a native Hungarian speaker who took some Finnish classes during his university years, I loved the grammar part. The structure and the logic is extremely similar even the pronunciation was an easy deal but on that note I can't say the same about the vocabulary. Ugh that was challenging. 😅 Our languages distantiated and evolved so differently that an average Hungarian speaker would not catch a word of Finnish. Except very basic words like blood or tree. I would love to resume my Finnish studies one day for sure. You should record a video of Hungarian vs. Finnish vs. Estonian as there'd be loads of stuff to discuss 🇪🇪🇫🇮🇭🇺
@@VSaccount Yes, we have those words hehe I wish we had more in common and we should learn each other's languages and deepen again the common heritage we have/had. 😉
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Hello! I'm from Estonia
@@steven-x6k Hello! :)
@katkot gamer Hi there!
@@steven-x6k ma kaa
1:16 it's other way around
Edit: we have these slangs around finland so we understand estonian like it's a finnish slang
I'm a Finnish speaking person and once I was in Estonia buying something, it took me a moment to realise the salesman was speaking Estonian to me and not just bad Finnish :D but we kinda understood each other
Pure luck! When I was in the Tallinnk Shuttle ordering food in Burger King, I was kind of surprised that the cashier understood what mom said.
Its said that estonians understand finnish but finnish dont understand estonia
Kiva juttu
@@Masipasi09 nii onkin suomi perkele viina ja sauna
@@walterthedog5953 waltha
I drive a Taxi in Helsinki, and not long back, had an Estonian customer who didnt' speak Finnish, but was very talkative - with a little bit of effort we managed to hold a conversation where we mostly understood each other. 😁
It took some mental effort and imagination though - often I would find a connection between some word and another rarely used word in Finnish, or a word in Finnish used in a slightly different way.
I rather suspect that I could learn Estonian with exposure and with a little instruction, enough to understand most Estonian speech.
I was in the Beer House in Tallin and there was a drunk woman there who only spoke Estonian. I got that her family was from Russian, and she didn't like Russians. Eventually though she tried to purloin my beer and I called the staff to kick her out lol. I think that even though she hated Russians, she still acted like one.
Have you played My Summer Car? I think you'd like it since you drive a taxi in Finland.
Great that you still had the conversation in your own respective languages and at least somewhat understood each other :D English would've been boring compared to that!
I don't have many experiences on talking to an Estonian except for this one drunk construction worker who I met at a hostel in Tallinn. He claimed that he's working in Kuopio (if I remember correctly) and I was trying to talk with him for more than an hour. He switched between English, Finnish and Estonian all the time and I couldn't make up what he was saying in any of those languages
@@lurji Nice, although it's not my real name. It refers to a guy who makes videos as well. His real name is Petri Ranta and he lives in a town called Hyvinkää. "Hyvinkäältä" = "from Hyvinkää"
@@Pyovali
Oh all Russians act like that, right? I see
As a non-native Hungarian speaker I can say that I can understand with confidence about 0% of Finnish or Estonian
Same here.
I can speak English, but I understand 0% of Bengali although it is a related language.
There are afew understandable words with hungarian and finnish, its more like 0.5%
@@katti2227 yeah in all seriousness there are a few words (of course not obvious loan words like "auto") and if you learn the rules for the corresponding sound changes between the languages then you can understand more words. Helps that I studied linguistics too.
The words for blood are similar (vér and veri) but since my knowledge is limited to song lyrics I can't think of others.
Estonian: I'm gonna clean the room.
Finn: Why on earth would you decorate a corpse?
LOL
Why not tho😁
Koristan also might mean you’re gonna decorate the room, but light decoration resetting stuff
Hetkone mite tää menee viroks
@@PrincessBlack04 Koristan ruumi - Koristaan ruumin
As a native Finnish speaker, my favourite false friend in Estonian is 'hallitus':
Estonian hallitus = mold (as in mouldy bread), in Finnish hallitus = board of directors or council of state.
I also happen to like your favourite false friend. Stupid mold.
There's another good one, in Estonian a hawk is 'kull' and both the genitive & partitive 'kulli'. You can make compounds like 'öökull' and 'kanakull'. If you take a train from Tallinn to Tartu then there's also a stop/village called Kulli - announced loudly on the PA :)
estonian ll is soft tho, not hard. we can't even pronounce the hard form of LL your dick demands...
@Meie One of the first false friends I learned: Finnish halpa = cheap; estonian halb = bad
@@vulc1 A colleague once remarked that my family name would be Veskimägi in Estonian.
As a Finnish person, Estonian always sounds to me like they're really optimistic, enthusiastic or possibly a little drunk. From what I've heard from Estonians, the opposite is also true: many Estonians think that a Finnish person speaking Finnish sounds like an overly serious farmer who just wants to be done with their fields. Many Estonians who know Finnish/live in Finland speak it incredibly well, but it's often easy to tell that they're from Estonia because their intonation goes up and down more.
This might not be as obvious just by listening to this video. Finnish people can be extremely flat in their casual speech, and the Finnish guy in this video is doing a good job, but obviously adding a little extra cadence so that the sentences don't sound completely dead (same can be heard in Finnish commercials, for example).
As an Estonian i can confirm we are very drunk
But don't Finnish people just sound overly serious in comparison to everyone else? And vice versa?
Do you know kalevala?
doomer finnish vs bloomer estonian
this is quite interesting!
Estonian: "What's your name?"
Finnish: *utter confusion and looking for its name*
@@kristomarcus1505 Lithuanian guy: just try my pergale
@@kristomarcus1505 That means suck a shit, in finnish.
@@Malinanaani mäki haluun tietää
@@Malinanaani mee takas kouluun niin tiiät
@@kristomarcus1505 1. "Ime paska" would be "suck a shit" in Finnish, we would never say that
2. We also have the word "perse" in Finnish
"I study" and "I will study" is expressed in the same way.
So relatable for a student.
Funny...
During the Cold War the people in Tallinn could watch Finnish tv, officially it was illegal but people found their ways. It was kind of a window to the western world, showing stuff like "Dallas" and "Knight Rider" :) Foreign tv shows had subtitles in Finnish, thats one way people learned Finnish back then.
I don't know are you Finnish or Estonian, but in Finland they teach this in schools history class :D
If i remember story from my late grandmom she used to bring chips to estonia which helped them to watch finnish tv. She was working as an accountant for polytechnic school in capital area. And she got chips from there if i remember correctly.
@@applessiini988 Sorry to interfere, but he told about Tallin (that is the estonian capital)... So, it seems quite clear to me that he is from Estonia.
If you are not used to the Cold War time, think that people from the so called "communist" countries could not watch films or ads from capitalist countries. Be the opposite was also true.
I am from Brazil, and I could never watch a film from the USSR, Cuba, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the DDR (German Democratic Republic), nor any other country from the "communist word".
I did not know that! (I'm finnish)
enceladus there weren't many "windows" to Europe in the Soviet Union, but after the Soviet Union broke, some countries were still dictatorships (Belarus, Kyrgyzstan), but there was some time when windows inside Europe started to appear and they got access to other countries radios (for example there was a polish radio, which was close to Poland-Ukraine-Belarus border, which told about the real situation in the world). Ukraine became much more free during 2000s, but Belarus has one president for over 25 years
Damn Paul, I'm a native Finnish speaker and you really know your way with languages. This video is extremely accurate, only error that I spotted was that verb learn in finnish is oppia, not opia. When I watched this Paul's video that compared Russian and Ukrainian, the comment section was full of people who said what I'm saying now. Keep up the good work!
He compared there even West Ukrainian dialects to standard Ukrainian. I as a western ukr was SHOCKED😍🇺🇦. This video was interesting for me as well because i used to study Estonian and when I read some post related to Kaisa MäkäräinenI could even get a word from there😄😂
@@ІринаБашинська-з1и Do you watch Ecolinguist videos?
Beat me to say *Oppia*
Sahil IS arabian name.
Although I would point out his mistake concerning word order in estonian, as there can be multiple ways the words can be put together not just one correct way.
As example
"Kui sa aeglesemalt sõidaksid, saaksin kaarti lugeda." could also go as "Kui sa sõidaksid aeglasemalt..."
This changes the focus of the problem expressed from speed to the nature of driving. In this example however it makes little difference, but the latter is usually said when the speaker is very annoyed by the driving manners and the speed of it just adds to the whole thing. Also can be considered to be more offensive and Karen.
"Õpin ülikoolis kirjandust." can also be said as "Õpin kirjandust ülikoolis." or even "Ülikoolis õpin kirjandust."
To sum up the differences, the first word is the most important one and the last word the least.
Also regarding grammar at 10:20. In estonian "Laua peal" can also be said "Laual" like in finnish.
Hi! I learned Finnish back in 1993 -1994 when I was an exchange student in southeastern Finland. In April 2017 I was able to visit again and during my short stay I managed to squeeze in a short trip to Tallinn. I was amazed at how similar both languages sound, intonation and all, yet I can only grasp the odd word in Estonian. Both are beautiful languages indeed. Lämpimiä terveisiä Costa Ricasta. Great work!
Samoin Suomesta :) 🇫🇮
Sorry I don't speak Finnish at all, but I was so curious about this languages. Greetings San José, Costa Rica mae!
Were you in Lappeenranta or somewhere else in southeastern Finland?
Reminds me of Standard German and Yiddish. From afar, Yiddish speakers use a very similar melody so you think you're going to 'get it', but when you start listening to what they're saying, you realize that you need another language course.
Yes, bouh sounds ugly and also Hungaryan
As a Finnish person, trying to understand Estonian is like talking to someone with a REALLY heavy dialect or accent. It feels like you should understand them, but for whatever reason you just have no clue what they are saying.
Sounds like me (native Spanish speaker) trying to understand Portuguese.
@@jorgen1990 that sounds like a brit trying to understand the irish
I can make out Estonian words that are very similar and make guesses what is in question. It's trippy and fun, but it you're actually talking to an Estonian, one should be mindful of the "danger words", I.e words that are almost homonyms between Finnish and Estonian, but have different meanings :D
@@jorgen1990 don’t know about you but I can understand Portuguese more than well, Italian too and many other Romance language, I would say that happens to me with French instead.
Note to self, exactly what I experience when i (Minnesotan) visit Alabama. I should be able to understand them, but it's just not there.
I am a simple Estonian. Whenever I see my country mentioned, I click.
I love your country dude
So there are difficult Estonians 🤔
same
@@eray-z5m but they're not. They are all agglutinatiive, but definitely not the same family.
Antoni L All these 3 languages are in Ural-Altaic language family. You can search it.
Finnish + Estonian = Finest
Good one
I approve of this message.
@doctor yksi Hellin :)
I love you, your our baby country Estonia :)
Kyllä
Estonian is a happy language :) I'm a Finnish person and I always enjoy hearing the Estonian announcements on a ferry cruise to Tallinn. I usually understand the topic and few words here and there but never the details. I think I could understand well if I was intensively exposed to the language for one year.
Tere Tulemast! I've noticed when Estonians speak they sound, let's say, very passionate!
That's interesting: I would never think about my language being considered as happy :)
I also enjoy hearing these ferry announcements, but the Finnish ones. Finnish sounds like cool for me, but unfortunately can speak it very little.
@@priit1985 Many Estonian verbs sound like the "relaxed" forms of Finnish ones. Like the verb "lugesin" on the video: It means the same as "luin" but sounds much more like "lukaisin", which adds the meaning that you did it easily, without any effort and in a short time. The Bible is quite a long book, so that example sentence at 10:55 caused me to laugh out loud. :D And there are many more similar examples, not just verbs. Estonian sounds like there's no worry in the world. :)
Every Finnish person ever who has been on the viking line cruise know the announcement "tere tulemas Tallinnaa" I know I probably spelled that wrong but u don't know how to speel Estonian.
@@notarobot2751 Tere tulemast Tallinna! ;)
When I called Finnair phone service the person answered in beautiful Finnish language. I asked immediately: " You speak so nicely, you cannot be Finnish?". And he confessed to being an Estonian.
When I spent my holydays in Tallinn in 1982. Our guide told us about the tourists from Finland and that the Languages are a bit similar. She told: "Both languages share appr. 600 words an if an Estonian guy and a Finnish guy are together and each one has 100g (vodka), they don't need no translator anymore."
I can guess that the vacations were quite limited due to Communist occupation.
Pystysuorariippumatto I should’ve added that unless you were finnish you weren’t getting in Estonia.
still true today.. I have friends from both countries and with enough booze, they start to understand each other :D
I can understand both Finnish better but I think me being half-Finnish half-Estonian has something to do with it and a bonus is that I can call myself the finest (Fin-Est)
Asutko suomessa
Lol I love that FinEst thing!:D
IDK channel nah bro you’re a Finstone
Just because your half of both can't say that if you understand the language or not. It's probably because your taught both languages?
A few years ago I adopted a cat with the name "Kissa". My Estonia neighbor immediately said, "Hey, I think that means 'cat' in Finnish." He was right!
Cat is Kass in Estonian :) very similar
Kissa = Peeing in Swedish
:D in Russian "Kisa" 🐱 :D
This is from Swedish dialects which show forms for cat like "kisse", "kise", "kissa", "kiss". Probably ultimately from a cat call "kis-kis-kis" used throughout Europe, at least in Spain, Italy, Russia and Sweden.
Huh, in Russian too.
Finnish sounds like something holy. Listening to Finnish can make me calm down if I got angry. Love from Azerbaijan. 💙
I was just researching the difference between accusative and partitive case in finnish, it’s really fascinating. Great timing, now I get to rest for 18 minutes!!
Yeah that one is maybe one of the biggest things you learn when you learn finnish grammar. and one of the most difficult aspects as well because mostly completely different than other languages use of undefined amounts of things or matter
@@nopo_b3645 that's tough for us Brazilians. we DON'T use partitives. if I want some cake, I just say "I want cake". it's kinda hard to internalize that further explanation
The difference of total and partial objects, subjects and complements is quite similar in Estonian and Finnish.
Ostin leipää ja juustoa. X Ostsin leiba ja juustu. (I bought some bread and cheese.)
Ostin leivän ja juuston. X Ostsin leiva ja juustu. (I bought the bread and cheese.)
Miehiä tuli sekä rannalta että metsästä. X Mehi tuli nii rannalt kui metsast. (There were men coming both from the beach and from the forest.)
Miehet tulivat metsästä. X Mehed tulid metsast. (The men came from the forest.)
Englanti on mulle täyttä hepreaa. (English is completely Hebrew for me.)Englanti onkin heprea. (English actually is Hebrew.)
I love it when he makes videos of languages, like these, that make English look simple!
Btw, South Estonian dialects do differentiate between Accusative and Partitive, unlike Northern Estonian dialects and Standard Estonian.
I've Heard That Estonian Sounds Like Drunken Finnish And Finnish Sounds Like Drunken Estonian.
well there's a fair amount of alcohol being consumed in both countries so there you have it I guess
That's because lots of Finns make weekend trips to Tallinn to party and get drunk, and vice versa with Estonians coming to Helsinki. So when a Finn meets an Estonian, they are rarely both sober.
@@mike200017 I confirm that. My GF was Estonian and I met many drunk Finns both in Tallinn and Pärnu. Some of them even approached me talking in Finnish and I was like "whaaaaat?" :-D lol many of them would also buy stocks of alcohol in Estonia to take it back to Finland since it was cheaper :-D
@@mike200017 I Thought The Estonians All Went To Latvia For The Cheap Alcohol!
Go to tallinn old town on weekend then you will know who actually the best drunkers among both.
As a foreigner living in Finland and trying to learn it, the only thing I can say is that there's a huge step between mastering written Finnish, the one you are taught, and oral Finnish. It's like two different languages, people use a different vocabulary, shortwords in replacement of every long word, contractions which you can't understand if nobody explained you before, simpler conjugation and every time I discussed about partitive to a Finnish, they almost ran away, even them find their grammar too complex. So, for a foreigner, it's hard because it's like having to learn two languages.
Finns run away because despite going through the grammar in school, most of us don't actually learn it. We just know it from learning as babes so trying to actually explain, nevermind actually give a reason why something is the way it is grammatically would be a nightmare to most.
I have immigrant co-workers that don't speak Finnish well. I always have to talk to them in written Finnish so they could understand me better. But I always tend to start speaking in the spoken Finnish because speaking so formaly using written language feels so slow. In spoken Finnish the words just effortlessly flow out of my mouth.
@@jokuvaan5175 that's so true, and frustrating at the same time for me as I make efforts to learn some rather strange grammar (to me) and when i find out natives don't speak like that, I feel like "hey, why don't I learn this simpler Finnish?"😁
@@Redgethechemist I guess the written is taught first so that you could actually read some legal documents etc. And every Finnish speaker can speak the written language if they just want to.
We also tend to invent our own versions of shortwords as we talk and usually people still understand each other :D
I'm a Dutch girl trying to learn Finnish (don't ask me why, I'm not certain either, but I like to do it, soo...) and I found this video very interesting. I love language as well, so you have a new subscriber!
Tsemppiä suomen opiskeluun!
Edu Soome keele õppimisega.
We have a saying in Czech that could be translated as: "The more languages you learn, the more times you're a human." I am learning finnish too, even if I might not use it often, I do like to travel quite a bit, though. Learning languages is just an enjoyable hobby of mine and I like to learn more about other people in the world.
Alankomaat, was that Matalmaa in eesti keeles. Tegelik alanko on matala,
Osaatko lisää suomee nyt
”Jos ajaisit hitaammin, niin pystyisin lukemaan karttaa.” -Normal (kindly asking, but f u) form
”Jospa ajaisit hitaammin, niin pystyisin lukemaan karttaa.” -Very subtle, slightly frustrated f u form
”Ajaisit hitaammin... pystyisin lukemaan karttaa” -Theatrical/old form.
”Jos ajaisit hitaammin... pystyisin lukemaan karttaakin.” -Friendly subtle f u form
Ajasit hitaammin, niin pystysin lukeen karttaaki, perkele! -More modern not so subtle f u form
Expressing the degree of your frustration is the core of Finnish language.
Tbh me, an Estonian, thought a car stepped on ur keyboard
Well said
"karttaakin" doesn't really work here, since it implies that you are reading or doing something else as well. Except if that indeed is the case.
@@TwistedNerve1 The something else is most obviously giving directions to the driver.
@@romaliop
Ehkä. Mutta ei silti toimi
You can also say "laual" in Estonian, you don't need to use "laua peal", so the same structure can be used as in "pöydällä". Sorry, if somebody already mentioned it.
And in Finnish, it's possible to say _pöydän päällä_ though no one uses it, everyone uses _pöydällä_ 😄
@@NellasxElensar plus in some dialects, you could say pöyän pääl in informal speech.
Lauta in Finnish means a plank or board (like in games).
NellasxElensar 机の上に vs 机に
and in Finnish there is ehtoo, but he said no analogue of õhtu
Love 🇪🇪 and 🇫🇮 from 🇭🇺!
Finno ugric brothers :)💕
Love to 🇭🇺 from 🇫🇮 too! 😊
God tier languages 😎
@Dimitrij Fedorov English speakers greeting their Tocharian brothers ITT
Szeretlem!
Uralic language best language! I seriously want to try learning Hungarian; it's in the same language family but far enough away to not be intelligible
My experience as an Estonian from southern Estonia (meaning no Finnish TV as a child as the Finnish broadcast did not reach that far) now living in Finland for the second year: Before learning any Finnish, I understood basically nothing! I mean there are many basic words that are the same or similar (like ‘käsi’ - ‘hand’, ‘vesi’ - ‘water’), but that does not get you very far even for everyday language. I remember reading the warning label on the radiators saying ‘Ei saa peittää’ - ‘do not cover’. The meaning is quite obvious from the context, I mean what else would you need to write on a radiator? But in Estonian ‘Ei saa peita’ means ‘cannot be hidden’ (Is this a challenge? Sure it can! Let me show you! :D). Trying to read a newspaper, I would recognize a word here and there, but that’s about it. Of course I would understand the international words like ‘koronavirus’ and such, but Finnish uses a lot fewer international words than Estonian, so if a Finn knows any Swedish or German or even English, they would automatically know more words in Estonian than the other way around. Some examples from Estonian and Finnish: ‘sport’ - ‘urheilu’, ‘start’ - ‘lähtö’, ‘telefon’ - ‘puhelin’. Without specifically learning those words, an Estonian would not recognize them in Finnish.
Now, while living in Finland and trying to learn Finnish almost every day, I can talk about simple concepts and things in Finnish but nothing complex really. I can understand perhaps 50-60% of newspaper articles, but only perhaps 30% from of everyday spoken Finnish (like listening to a Finnish conversation). The hardest part for me is the vocabulary. (Grammar is mostly similar.) Basically I need to learn completely new words that are unrelated to any other languages I know for everything! I can speak English, Russian, Swedish, Norwegian and basic German and I have to say that learning any of those other languages has been super easy compared to learning Finnish (even though I am Estonian!). Why so? Mostly because of very simple grammar (English, Swedish and Norwegian at least) and similar words in many of those languages. As mentioned in the video, Estonian has borrowed a lot of words from Low German and idiomatic expressions from High German, so in terms or words and expressions, those languages are (surprisingly) closer to Estonian than Finnish is!
Also, I have noticed that it is easier for a Finn to learn Estonian, probably because they would recognize some words from multitude of Finnish dialects that are still in use today and others from Germanic languages (Swedish, German), that they have often learned previously. Estonian is much more standardized and I’d say most Estonians don’t know any dialects (which may be more similar to Finnish) apart from a few words here and there.
Being able to speak English almost anywhere in Finland has unfortunately not helped me learn Finnish quicker. Even when some Finns have insisted on speaking Finnish, after they suffer through a few minutes of me trying to recollect some Finnish words, they usually give up and start speaking English to me :D.
Do not feel bad, my Friend. I studied French for 4 years in secondary school. Every time I have met a Francophone, they have asked me to please speak English.
Wow, this is an insteresting story. I'm proud of an Estonian studying MY language, since they're so similar. Anyway, I'm pretty sure you'll reach your goal of speaking Finnish (not fluently but enough for conversations). Spoken Finnish might be tricky, but you can start comparing spoken Finnish with written Finnish and see how similar they are and then memorize the shortenings and slight changes (for example: minä -> mä, olen -> oon)
Telefon is the same Word in deustch too haha
No, kirjotit ton kommentin vuos sit. Oletan et su kielitaitos o paremp nykyää mut kiinnostaapaha mua se nyt silti. Pystyk ymmärtää mitä mää sano täs? 'Mein suomalaiste o mukava kuul mite ihmiset muual maast vaik iha naapuristaki o tulee suomee ja oppii tän kiele. Tosi moni nuar ei oikee kyl välit tai sit kirjaimmelist vaa haukkuu, ko kaik ei onnist, mu onha se ihanaa kuul kokemuksia täst opiskelust.'
Pidä hyvä päivä!
Täst saat myös ton tekstin kiejakielel, jos helpompaa!
"Meidän suomalaisten on mukava kuulla miten ihmiset muualta maasta, vaikka ihan naapuristakin olisi, on tullut suomeen ja opiskelee tämän kielen. Tosi moni nuori ei oikein kyllä välitä tai sitten kirjaimellisesti vain haukkuu, kun kaikki ei onnistu, mutta onhan se ihanaa kuulla kokemuksia tästä opiskelusta."
Nagu lõuna-Eesti murdet on vaikeempi ymmärtää põhja-Eesti dialektiin verrattuna.
3:47 there is an archaic word for evening in Finnish, called "ehtoo", which seems to be a cognate with the Estonian õhtu. But I don't think most Finns would pick it up in a conversation, unless they're already aware of the connection.
I do hear some Finns still use Ehtoo though, by saying "Ehtoota!" as a greeting.
"Ehtoollinen" used to mean usual dinner generally in Finnish, but these days it only means the Holy communion, diregarding some dialects.
EHTOOTA! raipe
4.4.2010 ehtoo on synonyymi sanalle ilta.
sanontaa käytetään kun moikataan kavereille,ja myös silloin kun mennään jonkun luo.Käytetään vuorokauden ajasta riippumatta myös aamuin,päivin ja öin. "Ehtoot!/Ehtot!"
"Ehtooooota tupaan!
"Ehtoot vaa!! ;D
It's not even that archaic. Many people still use it occasionally.
I can tell that "ilta" is probably relative to Estonian word "hilja", what has lots of versions in local dialects like "ilda", and means "late". Not hard to see similar origin.
As Karelian, I understand both. Given comparison is very accurate.
Pagizetgo karjalakse?
@@katti2227 pagizen
Alexander Muravya Oletgo suomen karjalaine libo karjalan tazavallus libo tverin karjalaine?
Eh?
Michael Smith karelian is not a dialect but a language and 7% of russian karelia speaks it
I didn't know Estonian had so much or even any significant German influnece. I knew that Estonia, Livonia and Couronia used to be ruled by baltic german nobles, but not that they had so much influence on the language of their subjects.
Yes, I think Estonian sounds a bit like Finnish with some German influence :)
The Baltic Germans rarely bothered learning Estonian, so Estonian subjects probably had to learn a little German (and later, also Russian) to speak to their German rulers
@Jānis Stu My condolences to all Latvians.
@@zanderrose Well it makes some sense, they probably wanted the locals to assimliate in a similar way to what happend in Prussia(where the native Baltic "Old Prussians" got assimilated into German culture and language). It's probably good that this didn't happen, it's sad that old Prussian is not a language and people that exists anymore.
@@smuu1996 Estonian literacy wss forming during the baltic-german rule so yeah, they borrowed some stuff. Also I believe Prussians still exist but because there is no language, there is no nation
"Finnish and Estonian languages are so similiar"
Finns when they hear Estonian: *confused screaming*
Estonians when they hear Finnish: [visible confusion]
Many estonian words just sound really funny
Not really. I'm Estonian and I can understand at least written Finnish in very broad strokes, having never learned it. Spoken language is a lot harder to understand, but depending on what's being said, if it's not super long or complicated, you could figure it out. And you can easily hold a fairly detailed conversation if each of the parties involved has SOME knowledge of the other language. I've seen people have Finnish-Estonian convos, one speaking Estonian, the other replying in Finnish, and it working fine. The absolute peak was once a couple on the bus who was debating US' economic sanctions on Iran. :D When I was little, we had a Finnish neighbour and that's how him and my parents would talk - one in Estonian, the other in Finnish. The prerequisite is some familiarity, of course, and being used to hearing those words spoken, as the pronunciation is often quite different. I've been generally told that for outsiders, Estonian sounds like fast Finnish :D.
Actually, its prpven that estonians understand finnish quite well, while fins seem to find it difficult to.comprehend estonian, sorry for the shitty grammar im wasted off my balls
I can speak fluently both😎
@@Futu06 I wish you had been working in the hamburger restaurant in Tallinn that I visited once. I tried to simply order some food in Finnish, but the cashier could not understand me. Ultimately I had to make my order in English.
You left out the whole part regarding phonetics! Estonian is unique in having 3 distinctive lengths for both vowels and consonants (lina/linna/linnna). And also interesting consonant alternations in the declension of nouns.
maybe a theme for a next video
And Finnish has vowel harmony, which modern Estonian lacks. Each language has their own unique traits.
Well, Finnish has two lengths in both vowels and consonants like: tuli (fire), tuuli (wind), tulli (border control)
But Estonian not only has one more length but also vowels and consonant clusters us Finns don't have. This is why we tend to understand written Estonian much better than spoken.
@@corinna007 This was mentioned in the first example
Wait, yall fr have words with 3 consonants in a row?? Linnna sounds like a spelling error in finnish, what does it mean?
It's interesting that even though Finnish is the conservative one, to Finns Estonian words often sound quite archaic.
For example:
Mother = ema 🇪🇪 / äiti 🇫🇮
Finnish also has the word "emä" but it's only used of animals these days. It's also used in words like emakko 🇫🇮 = a sow
Raincoat = vihmamantel 🇪🇪/ sadetakki 🇫🇮
Finnish has the words "vihma" (drizzle) and "mantteli" (overcoat), but no one uses the latter word anymore.
(this is one of my favourite Estonian words btw)
Evening = õhtu 🇪🇪 / ilta 🇫🇮
Finnish has the word "ehtoo", but once again, it sounds really archaic.
Also because Finns have used some of these loans like "telefoni" and "köökki" (kitchen) before, but not anymore (they can be used in some dialects though), they also sound old-fashioned to Finns nowadays.
Not to diss either language, this is just something I find interesting! :)
I'm finnish and we use "köökki" sometimes. In my family and grandma's and grandpa house's
Even one of the examples, tere öhtust, the word öhtust is very similar to the old Finnish word ehtoo, meaning the same.
It's pretty common in a lot of language families for advancing languages to retain some archaic and traditional words and phrases. English, despite being more "innovative" in the sense of being more universally accessible than something like German has a lot of old Germanic vocabulary not used today in other languages. Words like king, town, and twilight (literally "two-light") have changed very little in the past 1,000 years yet these can't be found in common use in other languages like German or Dutch. I don't even need to get into all the Old Norse vocabulary in English. German is still way more conservative than English though, especially in grammar.
Both languages' speakers can hear archaic words in the other language, which have become rare or disappeared in their own language. ALso the other language might use still the old word you recognize, but your language might have replaced it with a loan word from a third language.
Yeah, it's interesting. Also what I've heard from finns and noticed myself as an estonian is that our languages feel like grammarly incorrect to each other.
Love to Estonia from Finland, let's never get far away from each others ❤️ The only friend we can trust on
Love from Estonia for you
@Pyllynalle FIN says the guy called Pyllynalle huh
How is Estonia your friend? The got cheap alcohol? Explain please
@@maxim9280 Dear Maxim. Estonia is our friend for they are the only Finno -branch, of Finno-Ugric nations, beside Finland, free from russian submission. That is why, dear Maxim, they are our friends.
@@ninaakari5181 Going from Tallinn to Helsinki doesn't feel like going abroad. Most everything is still intelligible, it's just written in a funny way. I'd like to see schools teaching more Finnish in Estonia, as it's a shame, that we have to revert to English to communicate despite both being Finnic. Regardless, it's good to see that there are still warm feelings between the two people.
As a Hungarian I find that Finnish and Estonian are quite alike. I also see the more ancient connection between my own language and both of these. You can feel how astonishingly far back in time this connection takes us once a Hungarian gets more acquianted with either one of these languages, the differences being a factor of the passing time.
Szia! i can’t understand anything (finnul, észtül) suchlike phrase ”egy szép lányt láttam a házban” (yhden sievän tytön näin talossa) but translate (fordílás=käännös) and changing lány> nö (wrong ö)=neito,neiu and näin> vaattasin, vahtasin. Of course ház= talo, maja. Too much different words. Some suffixes are easy (🤔) to explain Saksas,Saksassa= Németországon. Saksamaal, saksanmaalla= németországban. Észtországban, Finnországban…(vagy,või,vai 🫤)well in this case nem tudom, en tiedä, ma ei tea
@@markusmakela9380 Hei! Yes these differences show the amount of time that separates the two languages. The same sentence in English and French or Greek won't be intelligible either, because Germanic and Latin and Greek languages seem to have separated a long time ago, although they are all Indo-European and had later a lot of interchange: "I saw a beautiful girl in the house" (French: "J'ai vu une belle fille dans la maison"; Greek with English letters: "Ida ena omorfi koritisi stin spiti"). The correspondence between Hungarian and Finnish can be seen mostly in the regular sound-shifts of basical words, like fej-pää, hal-kala.
usually everything is finnish like számitogép= tietokone (tudja-gép) , but sometimes we use ironically (sarcastic way) aslike there would be ”loanword” kompuutterinpaska ( ”shitty computer”; számítogépszár. Have you Magyarországon any ”sarcastic” loanword (btw. the bus, a busz= linja-auto, (onnikka, very old word) and in Tampere (Däbrätsä of Finland) they use word ”nysse” ( ny se tulee=now it coming) everyday. (Debrecen pronouncing hears to us däbrätsä 🤔
I'm an Estoninan and moved to Finland 2,5 years ago. It took about one month to learn Finnish on the level of communicating and getting a job. For now I feel I'm forgetting a bit of Estonian grammar and I'm morfing two languages (depends which one I'm speaking).
Hearing how phonetically similar they are, it is understandable.
It's not like Swedish and Norwegian , that uses very different fonology, making it easier to hold separate in your head.
@Amirr33
They are not always mutually inteligable.
There are many false friends and the split of West Norse and East Norse languages does create some grammatical difference.
(West Norse: Norwegian, Faroeian, Icelandic.
East Norse: Danish, Swedish, Geatish)
@amr3 Standard Norwegian (spoken in and around Oslo) is mutually intelligible with Swedish, the Norwegian dialects not as much.
@@GegoXaren linguistically, norwegian Danish and swedish are considered dialects of the same language
@@tsoii
Not really.
I (a Finn) got surprised how much I can understand Estonian when I started learning some Estonian. I didn't continue to study Estonian. I can read Estonian news and understand what an article is about. But I probably would have some problems understanding some parts. I watched a part of Eesti Laul 2020 final and understood most of what the hosts were saying. If I have had more exposure to the Estonian language, I probably would understand more of it. I think I could have simple conversations in Estonian with my current skills, but I probably wouldn't always know for sure if a word is the same in Estonian and Finnish. I think my understanding is much better than my conversation skills in Estonian. I probably should study more Estonian, when I have time for it because I travel to Estonia quite often. And there I have noticed that some Finns (not me) just "rudely" speak Finnish to Estonians and assume that they understand all of what they're saying.
You really have made an amazing work for this video. Great job, Paul!
That's what I've been saying. The languages are much more similar than they initially appear and with a little exposure you can understand surprisingly much. I haven't properly studied Estonian, but I have looked up some song translations through the years and checked some words from dictionary when I've been unsure of the meaning. With some effort I can read Estonian newspapers and even watch Estonian television programs. I don't understand all of it, but enough to get the general idea what people are talking about (most of the time).
I've definetly had some limited conversations with my friends' friends where they were speaking finnish and i was speaking estonian. Understanding the topic of a conversation isn't too difficult (at least if you have had some exposure) but really speaking it is ofcourse another story
En oikein ymmärrä Viroa melkein yhtään. Kun olimme Tallinnassa katottiin virolaisia uutisia, ja me kaikki sanottiin koko ajan "mun pitäis ymmärtää, mutta mä vaan en". Enkö oikein ymmärrä koska olen nuori, en ole ollut Virossa tarpeeksi, en lue Viroa ja olen suomenruotsalainen?
(Vau, Mim. Toi oli typerä kysymys.)
It sounds like Estonian has a sentence order like that of Yoda’s “If you more slowly drive, I will be able the map to read”
There are multiple permutations of the word order that are all correct, but then the stress or tone of the sentence might slightly change. For example, at 14:39 , if you change the order of "you would drive" and "more slowly", it would put more stress on "more slowly" and might sound a bit passive-aggressive. If you do the same switch in the second part of the sentence, it's still correct, but just awkward without any undertone.
But i suppose so, yes. It doesn't make it any easier for me to understand Yoda though.
@@Desimere So basically like in German. The word order can change and it changes stress.
@@gaston6800 :o i had no idea. I guess we Are quite Germanized then after all.
@@Desimere I guess so
@@Desimere Estonian word order is still a lot more flexible than Gerrman.
When I volunteered in Estonia, I couldn't hear the difference between Estonian (spoken by locals) and Finnish (spoken by tourists) first. It only came with the experience that sometimes I could understand words and phrases, then later on I noticed the real differences.
Finnish is probably one of the most difficult language in the world unless you're Estonian.
Having a Latin script helps a ton, even if the rules and exceptions to those rules are a bit wonky.
Skimming Sami grammar, I'd definitely argue it's scarier than Finnish.
Even for an Estonian if you start learning Finnish grammar, it can seem difficult. And they have much longer words.
In general Foreigners tend to learn grammar rules better than Finns :D
Im a native Finnish speaker... but I couldnt give any Grammar tips, due all complicated rules are learned with Ear.
Not in the world, in Europe. In the world, there are a lot of much more difficult languages.
Fascinating!!! Thank you for all the hard work and research you put into these videos. We really appreciate it!
It’s my pleasure! Thanks for the kind words.
Can we see a spotlight on the Uralic Language Family, as you did for Slavic and Germanic?
Sadly, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are the only Uralic languages which are spoken by many people and have literature. Sami languages and the other Uralic languages have gone extinct or are part of a very small group of people which is why there is not a lot of research available.
@@akumayoxiruma In Russia many people speak Uralic languages at home
I would love to see this type of video for Latvian and Lithuanian! They're in a very similar situation to these two. Two closely related languages, only slightly mutually intelligible, one evolved more and the other stayed more traditional. Except I'd say even though they are supposed to be very similar, from a Latvian's perspective it feels like Lithuanian is somewhere between Latgalian and Russian.
I want to see that video too.
Lithuanian is based on Aukstaitian which is very similar to Latgalian.
As far as I know Latvian is based not on Latgalian but on western tribes (Curonians, Semigallians?) and thus is similar to Samogitian.
Also Lithuanian has huge Polish (not Russian) influence, while Latvian has huge Germanic, Livonian and Russian influence. Lithuanian has no Germanic influence. Due to different history since 1200s.
Thus Lithuanians and Latvians do not understand each other.
@@eglepegle7037 I'm pretty sure Latvian is mainly based on the Vidzeme dialect since I think that's the most similar dialect to the literary language. But yeah, I'd guess it's mainly based on influence from different languages. I know Latvian got its first syllable accent from the Finnic languages like Estonian and Livonian, as well as several other things probably. That's cool tho, thanks for the info.
im finnish and to me latvian sounds nordic while lithuanian sounds slavic
@@VSaccount I guess it makes sense, Lithuanian is closer to the Slavic countries and Latvian has had quite a lot of influence from Livonian, a language from the same language family as Estonian and Finnish, but which is now extinct basically.
Finnish has also another word for evening, its called ”ehtoo”. Much more similar to estonian ”õhtust” 😁 ehtoo is used more by older generation
I think 'ehtoo' is used more in the western dialects of Finnish.
evening - õhtu in Estonian
En ole koskaan kuullut ehtosta. (Asun Itä-Uusimaassa)
Yeah, I noticed stuff like this a couple times during the video. Oftentimes the Estonian word is reminiscent of a rarely used archaic or poetic synonym of a Finnish word. Really interesting, and intuitive when you think about the languages' shared history.
Hente Hoo might be! Haven’t done enough research to argue with that😄
Yes!!
I've been wanting a video on either Finnish or Estonian and you bring both in one!
Thanks Paul!
We are brothers 🇫🇮🇪🇪
Yes
Veli! \o/ :D
Yes! Finland and Estonia! 🇫🇮✌🇰🇵
Oh that was a accident! Ha! North Korea flag. 🇫🇮✌🇪🇪
❤❤🇫🇮🇫🇮🇪🇪🇪🇪💙💙
My mother tongue is English language but after learning Estoniam I had an interesting experience when visiting Finland where Swedish language is also an official language. When reading sign posts I was initially misled by Swedish with instructions which appeared very English but actually meant something else
I found it more useful to figure out Finnish language instruction through Estonian
😯👍
First Conlang critic, then Langfocus: I defenitly won't do anything for school today
all these wild pleasures will be your doom... ;)
You don't need to go to school, when there is Paul's channel around! Have you ever heard in school talking about Finnish and Estonian? At least I haven't.
NativLang released one a few days ago too about Mongolic!
Lol that's true! Let's just learn things from UA-cam.
cool fact about finnish and estonia
Estonia= Ma koristan ruumis
Finnish= Minä siivoan huoneessa
translating Estonian sentence to Finnish = I am decorating a dead body
eh we would use more of
Ma koristan toas
The estonian sentence is super clunky and we would never say it like that.
My fellow Estonians. It was said with a joke to show how similar it would sound. Tho my sentence is still correct even if it sounds clunky or what not
I just want to say Estonia has got one of the simplest but beautiful flags in the world. My favorite since I was a child.
Its winter landscape on Estonian flag :)
Icy lake, Dark forest and blue sky.
I agree completely!
Yeah, somwhere on the Internet I saw a photo of some snowy area with forest that looked almost black and the blue sky above it. The photo was compared to estonian flag and to this day I use it to remember the colours of the flag. Love the comparison and estonian flag is indeed pretty 😊
Aww thanks 😊
It's literally just Blue sky - Dark forest - Snowy ground. Someone just chose the colors based on what they saw.
Thanks for this wonderful video! I'm an Estonian and I love Finns. We generally all do, they're like brothers to us.
It is a lot more common to use the contraction "laual" instead of "laua peal", they mean the exact same thing in context. That minor comment asside this is a very neat video for a native Estonian speaker who is conversational in Finnish. Picked up Finish from relatives across the bay and from weekend morning cartoons in the 90's and 00's.
It's also possible to say "pöydän päällä" in Finnish, but it's similarly less common. Apart from that, it was indeed interesting to learn about the differences.
@@pente393 En muista säkeistöä, niin ainoa juttu joka tuli mieleen on joku jäbä joka makasi ja syöi pöydän päällä XD
Yeah, and in Finnish people use both "pöydällä" and "pöydän päällä" without any real preference. Also if the object is large, you always use the word "päällä" instead, for example you wouldn't say "On the house" by using the form "Talolla" but instead it's "Talon päällä".
@@wardeni9603 Neat. In Estonian though don't recall ever hearing "Maja peal" unless it refers to the roof, instead it's usually "Katusel" or "Katuse peal", both mean on the roof. The use of "Majal" to mean on top of the house similarly doesn't happen though, "Majal" is only used to describe ap roperty the house has, at least in the dialect I speak.
@@antikristuseke Yeah, that's true, people do usually say "katolla" / "Katon päällä" (On the roof) rather than "on the house". But I just used that as an example, perhaps "on the hill" etc. would have made more sense as an example xD
What a well-researched presentation. And I was impressed that you can roll the Finnish R like a pro.
BTW, the Finnish word for "to learn" (around 12:30) should be oppia (not opia). It's that pesky consonant gradation.
It could be interesting a video with the comparison between all the Ugro-Finnic languages : Finnish,Hungarian,Estonian,Karelian,Võro etc...
Not to forget livonian. heh. Speakers maybe 10. Buggers. It used to be such a big ?nation?
It's a very hard task, especially if you want to include hungarian. At this point the only similarities between hungarian and finnic languages are words related to nature, the languages haven't had direct contact for a few thousand years
to thicc
Dont forget the Samoyedic Nenets language!
@@marcoadmiralis_1497 Also some verbs are simmilar too i believe
I am a Finn and I undestand Estonian very well, it is my second best language. I learned it first as a kid watching children's programs in Estonian TV and later I learned more by listening a lot to Estonian radio channels and by reading books in Estonian.
now that is a funny hobby :)
it was other way around ... pikkukakkonen and all that ... hated the clown, didn't understand him
That's how a lot of Estonians learn Finnish. Either that or well-paying unskilled labour jobs in Finland lol.
I grew up watching german cartoons on TV cuz estonian shows were boring to me. Estonian media IMO is dull and boring. Estonia is my native language so i didnt need to watch my shows.
I acted as a rally co-driver to an Estonian friend..
We ended up with a super hybrid form of both languages.
But the end result was crashes upon crashes as we would die out of laughter when speaking :p
(Not in real life though but in a game)
aww
That's hilarious XD
Do you understand Martin Järveoja's notes to Ott? :D:D
My brain trying to understand Uralic languages grammar:
"Nuapurista kuulu se polokan tahti jalakani pohjii kutkutti......"
Yess!!! :-D
Doesnt' help that this song is in savonian dialect which is a bit like comparing norwegian to swedish :)
Loituma!
The name of this song is "Ievan polkka", you can find it on UA-cam
the grammar is honestly not that different from indo european. Just more cases and post positions. Russian also has a 2 infinitive system with more cases than German e.g. I find Estonian easier than Chinese. (Prettier, too, and I find Cantonese very beautiful).
In my experience as a native Finn when i started learning Estonian it all seemed so easy and before long i thought i know alot but as i got the hang of it a bit more it occured to me how different these two languages really are. Yet so much in common that it makes the learning process harder because these two sometimes mix up in your head and you end up forming sentences in Finstonian. So if these languages were just a bit closer to each other or a bit further the learning would be easier. Anyway..just my opinion..anyone agree?
Have the vice versa experience, couldn’t agree more. The 20+ % of language we have in common is both a blessing and a curse.
It's called speaking Festish. Yes, I just made it up. Just broken Estonian/Finnish with broken grammar and vocabulary.
Finostonian! There is a language i would like to learn.
I have the same problem learning Polish being a Ukrainian speaker.
Both languages have similarities and it makes it hard to learn since you would end up mixing words
I have to say that many Estonian words like "Tere" are e.g. Used in one of the Finnish dialects called Tampereen dialect. I personally live in Tampere and it is common for people to say “tere, tere, miten menee? ” and also the word “Tere tulemast vaan” is very common and everyone understands. Although it is quite directly from the Estonian language ofcourse . Many do not understand it either where its coming from. I have worked with Estonian workers and I noticed that I understood very well what they were talking about, because there was always like one word in each sentence that was very close to Finnish. we laughed whenever I could comment on something in Finnish and they often understood what I said. I think it's great that we have such a close neighbor next door, because even though we have shared a lot of history with Swedish, Swedish is far from Finnish language and many Finns are not very eager to learn it.
As an Estonian who's living in Finland I can say some similarities in languages are surprising. Even slang and expressions have a lot of similarities.
Also one thing completely missed by this video is the difference in pronouncing g,b,d k,p,t or kk,pp,tt in the languages. Finnish is softer in pronouncing them.
Interestingly enough, although both languages are said to be read as you write. Meaning each letter is always pronounced the same way. The way you pronounce it in the corresponding alphabet, it is not entirely true, especially for Estonian.
One main difficulty for Fins pronouncing Estonian words is that we don't mark down softenings for letters. A lot of Estonians don't even notice we have two pronunciations for example for N, S or L.
Example: word "kann" in Estonian has three meanins and two pronunciations. The word can mean "a jug" without softening the N. Or "a doll/a toy"(older word) or "a butt cheek"(shortened word from "kannikas") while the N is softened. Softening to my knowledge does not exist in Finnish, As much as I've discussed this matter with Finnish friends.
Softening exists in Eastern Finnish dialects and Ingrian Finnish dialects.
Palatalisatsioon on olemas idasoome ja ingeri murdeis
By "softening," do you mean palatization, as in Celtic languages and many Slavic languages, or something else?
@@ericjohnson6634 The prononciation changes like if you add "b" thingy next to a letter than can be "softened". Otherwise it is still written as heared, the letter stays the same and no additional changes are done in Estonian.
Finnish and Estonian languages in nutshell: The other's drunken counterpart.
You shut your mouth and come estonia and we will make you talk i other direction
The Most important word in Estonian is KAINE ! If You know the meaning - You know The Language too !
@@trakni7106 i see you dont know what "Joke" means. Want me to translate it to you?
estonian to a finn is like a kid trying to sound funny
So fucking true!!
I love listening to Estonian, it sounds so fun (and kinda cute) to a Finnish speaker.
Yes. I wish I had a robot that would speak Estonian to me every evening.
Dont worry. We will only speak in the shortest of slurs.
Finnish sometimes sound to me very archaic dialect from far far land and sound like 3,4 kid talk, so primitive
@@matskustikee that's exactly what your English sounds like.
I studied in Tallinn for a couple of years (Bachelors), and once said to my Estonian class mates that Estonian sounds a bit like fairy-language to us Finns (quite fast, very "bouncing" on the intonation). One of them replied that Finnish sounds a bit like a dwarven language coming from under ground :D That's my favourite description of the two languages
Since they diverged 2000 years ago, it's amazing how many similarities remain! I mean, even 1000 year-old English is barely recognizable, and 2000 years ago French wasn't even a glint in Latin's eye. :^>
Old English is recognisable if you live in Britain but modern English is not derived directly from old English, it is derived from Anglo-Norse which was the dialects spoken in the Viking half of England. That language was heavily influenced by Scandinavian Northern Germanic and it was the language spoken in london 200 years after the Normans reinstated English as the official language by then old English was dying out or changing to Middle English although the dialects were dupifferent. Most of central, eastern and northern England spoke Anglo Norse dialects influenced either by Danish or West Norwegian hence the reason why English grammar ppand syntax, as well as numerals and day of the week are almost entirely derived from Old Norse and not old English if it had been old English modern English would sound very much like Dutch and German and not the hybrid West-North germanic language that it is today. According toe CIA world book the easiest language for an English speaker to learn is Norwegian. Although most people don’t know that because no one has to learn Norwegian. But it is actually true
@@prospektarty1513 Yup, as much as we can list the influences, and the contributors to Modern English, the journey to get here was not linear! Before modern communications and transportation, Britain was linguistically a diverse place, with diverse foreign influences on the language - and of course the line dividing for the Danelaw made Northern English fairly distinct for many centuries.
Old English has considerable similarities with Icelandish, and even more with the dwindling West Frisian (still spoken in the Frise area of The Netherlands).
I don't know if I'd want to delve into Norwegian; which form would you even learn: Bokmal or Nynorsk?
The rhythm of changes is not the same from one language to another. Some languages change faster than others, some languages are conservative and change more slowly, like Finnish and Icelandic for example.
@@vexator19 Speed of linguistic evolution is pretty directly related to the frequency of interaction with other cultures, I think. However: whether interactions were frequent or not, 2 millennia is a _l-o-n-g_ time!
I've waited for this video a loooooong time
To a non Finnish/ Estonian speaker their National Anthems sound a lot alike. I think both came fro the same source.
@@charlesstuart7290 Same melody (99,9%), different lyrics.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maamme
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_isamaa,_mu_%C3%B5nn_ja_r%C3%B5%C3%B5m
Holy shit I was dreaming of this video for years but was like nah he would never do it :O thank you so much :DDD
Fascinating! I’m a New Yorker who has sung in an Estonian choir 5+ years, most of the time trying to learn how to pronounce Estonian (especially õ). I learned a lot from this video - it’ll help me if my chorus survives this pandemic.
be optimist you will survive, you have too !!
@@matskustikee to* have to*
Paul, your videos always leave me speechless in terms of how well and thoughtfully prepared they are. Watching them, I end up being interested in every single foreign language out there, Finnish and Estonian included of course. I love the sound of both, even if they are far away from my linguistic "port". Thank you for yet another wonderfully inspiring video!
Tere! Having only spent a few days in Estonia and Finland, I cannot tell the two languages apart yet. I love how they sound anyway, and I wish I could learn one of them one day... I’d probably go for Estonian, since I really loved my stay there 😊
I am Estonian and Finnish sounds like very archaic Estonian language. Finns still use some words that Estonians stopped using centuries ago ("heinakuu" and "susi", for example).
I speak quite fluent Finnish and I can say same. For example finnish "kuolema" that means to die, is also koolema in Estonian, but usually elder people use that word.
Also Southern Estonian dialects sounds sometimes like Finnish and some words are even same.
As a fin that works with an Estonias, I'd say the same applies from our perspective.
A lot of old Finnish words pop up in the Estonian language.
@@aivarsein8701 Estonian "koolema" came from Russian language - околеть (okolet,)- умереть (umeret,)= to die.
@@avroraaspasia7214 okolet kuolema koolema, are you sure finnic languages loaned the word from russian and not vice versa? Or If they just share common ancestor? You cant really know for sure on all words unless you have a time machine...
If you look into Proto-Finnic vocabulary, Finnish words are often identical or very similar, while Estonian words have usually changed a lot more. And then both of them have kept "kuningas" almost unchanged since they borrowed it from Proto-Germanic *kuningaz some 2000 years ago xD
I lived for several years in Estonia, learned the language (though cannot say that I'm really fluent) and forever got a soft spot in my heart for those pine forests on the seashore and medieval spires of Tallinn.. Armas Eesti, väga igatsen sinu järele.
I remember that funny moment, when I first heard Finnish. It was in a bus in Tallinn, when I already started learning Estonian and intently listened for what people are speaking around :) And I was desperate that I barely could understand anything the couple next to me was talking about before realizing, that probably they were speaking Finnish. Indeed, Finnish pronunciation is different, and with some experience it is not difficult to distinct between the two even if you speak neither.
And a few remarks about the content:
1) The funniest 'false friend' is probably the word 'hallitus', which means 'mold' in Estonian and 'board of directors' in Finnish :)
2) Besides of 'laua peal' in Estonian you could use addessive 'laual', which is similar to Finnish usage.
3) The verb 'ajama' for 'to drive' also exists in Estonian, though it is not used in the sense of driving a car - rather like driving a herd of cattle.
In Finnish you can also say "pöydän päällä" if you want to give more emphasis to the fact that it's on top of the table or just want to use a longer form. Adessive is also used to mean "by means of" and "in the vicinity of", so genitive + "päällä" can be useful for disambiguation as well.
By the way, laud (which research tells me is the nominative of laua) seems to be another false friend: Finnish lauta means plank.
Also, instead of ”minä luin kirjan”, you can say ”luin kirjan läpi” which is the same as ”lugesin raamatu läbi”, if we go into spoken finnish and then finnish dialects, you will see almost everything is connected in finnish and estonian
@@heto795 Laud in Estonian also means a plank, some words can have multiple meanings, usually derived from context.
Go in the võrumaa
Ei ole sarnased, Kohe üldse
I am just so amazed, Paul about your breadth and depth of linguistics and language. Listening to your discussion of different cases, tenses, adverbs and assorted other sentence descriptors just defies simple comprehension. Left in the dust is the best way to think about my understanding of all this, and I can just about make myself understood in only about 3 languages. Kudos to you.
As an expat living in Estonian and who learns the language, and knows something about Finnish (because Happoraadio, Moonsorrow, and others), I say that, while the two languages sound very similar, it's still possible to tell one from the other on the streets, even on a low level (I'm currently A1~A2 in vocabulary, and B1 in grammar). I've heard Finns talking in Tartu (south-eastern Estonia), and they would always finish (no pun intended) the words with -ssa/ä or -la/ä (when the respective cases are necessary). That makes it possible to tell when someone is speaking Finnish. Also, vowel harmony helps, too.
Not gonna lie though, I'm kinda disappointed you didn't talk about examples like "ruumis🇫🇮 on ruumis🇪🇪" in the false friends section. Finnish 'ruumis' is "corpse", while Estonian 'ruumis' is "in the room" (inessive case of ruum), and "on" is the verb to-be, conjugated in the 3rd person singular (or plural, but not in this case).
As usual, great video :)
fswerneck no pun intended haha 😂 i love puns and i even love them more if they are denied or unwanted 😂
@@kyliejenner6059 naked thoughts, I hadn't thought of that until I wrote it. 🤣
As Estonian I can tell, there are even stranger false friends. "hallitus🇫🇮" means "government", but "hallitus🇪🇪" means "mold". And "pulma🇪🇪" means illative case of "marriage", but "pulma🇫🇮" means "trouble". 🤣
Estonians keeps decorating their corpses.
@@kyliejenner6059 a pun is fun!
Finnish is such an awesome language. I'm sure Estonian is too, but I don't know a lick of Estonian, so I can't comment lol The entire Uralic language family seems very interesting, definitely marked by beautifully complex grammar. Would you mind doing a video about Nenets?
Your videos are great, very informative!
😂😂😂😂😂wtf what awesome language? Are you deaf? I'm not racist , but man rly now , sounds like someone drowning in water😂😂where are you from?
@@hellolowiqpeople9341 haha
@@hellolowiqpeople9341 What's wrong with you? Finnish is one of the most beautiful languages in the world :)
@@mixlllllll 😂😂😂😂 stfu finnish 😂😂😂😂 who said that ? You from finland 😂😂😂
YAY Langfocus! Gracias Paul.
15:34 Including the word "niin" in formal or written text is one of the reasons my grammar teacher would mark my essays using a bright red pen as a sign of a grammatical error 😅 "Niin" is abundant in subordinate clauses in spoken Finnish, but considered often an error (and redundant) in formal speech/text. I don't persoonally find it odd at all to leave it out in this particular case. Excellent job with these videos - I'm a long-time subscriber 💪😎👍
Fascinating languages, and I love how they managed to survive in a continent dominated by Indo-European languages.
Finnish is much better language than example English, more efficient and accurate and logical, maybe that is the reason.
Can't say the same for our other Finno-Ugric brethren in Russia. They are being russified to extinction. If the Slavs didn't migrate here, almost the entirety of modern-day Russia would be Finno-Ugric.
The finnish language is spoken exactly like it is written, there are no hidden ways to pronounce things. "Extremely" is a word where every "e" is pronounced differently. There are multiple ways to pronounce most letters in english, but in finnish, every letter has a specific sound it makes, so it's extremely simple. Except "c", which can be "s", "k" or "sh", mostly used in loan words. As long as you learn the sounds to make for every letter, you can read a book written in finnish out loud, without knowing the words, and you would pronounce every single one correctly.
@@EggertPlaysmany Northern Russians are assimilated Finno-Ugric peoples
@@usrainagowno sadly
As a Finnish learner and German L2-speaker I really became intrigued to also take up Estonian after watching your presentation. I mean, Finnic vocabulary and grammar with a Germanic flavour and verb-final syntax on the subordinate clauses: that sounds just awesome! Excellent work, thanks for offering us such amazing videos!
For the "Hyvää iltaa"/"Tere õhtust" I might just add that Finnish does still have the word "ehtoo", meaning "evening", which is cognate with the Estonian word.
Paul J. Morton yeah, direct translation from Estonian would roughly be ”tervettä ehtoota” which would mean ”healthy evening to you”. Understandable in Finnish, but slightly archaic and funny sounding. I’m sure there are local dialects in e.g. Germany and Italy which are about as far from each other as are Estonian and Finnish.
@@DirtyMardi Yeah there's plenty of words in Estonian that to us Finns sound archaic another example would be the word for "summer" in Estonian which is "suvi" which in Finnish also means "summer" but is very archaic and mostly used as a female name (the typical Finnish word for "summer" is "kesä").
@@SampoPaalanen In Turku dialect and some other western dialects especially older people use suvi more than kesä. Most of written and hence officialized finnish was based on western dialect since Turku was the capital city back then. Ilta and kesä are exceptions to this rule. They're words of originally eastern dialect that won over their western counterparts.
@@JaniLaaksonen91 about that,ma koristan ruumid ära?
@@matskustikee that sounds like decorating the corpse, i think that has more to do with cleaning the room though :D
As a Finnish speaker, Estonian is such an interesting language to me. If someone were to talk Estonian to me, I probably wouldn't understand much, but when I see the two written next to each other all the similarities and changed words are so obvious and honestly quite amusing.
A Latvian here! I actually was quite surprised that there are so
many similarities to Latvian language, considering that Latvian is an
Indo-European language. (more info below)
The words and phrases are different, but you can definitely see common roots.
Sorry I am not differentiating below between Estonian and
Finnish, but the first one is Latvian in each case.
Māja - Maja - House,
kūts - Hütt - Hut,
Grāmata - Raamat - Book,
Ārsts - Arst - Doctor,
Apgūt - Õppige - To learn,
Lasīt - Loe - To read,
Augstskola - Ülikool - University,
Ja - Jos - If,
Sākt - Hakkan - Start,
Karte - Kartaa - Map,
And even if we are looking at sentences, then in Latvian a sentence: "I read
a book" would be:
"Es lasu grāmatu"
But you can definitely add "labi" at the end of that sentence to reassure that
it's well read, so this works, just not commonly used anymore:
"Es lasu grāmatu labi"
And even "Es" in a different conjugation is "Man" which is similar to "Ma", so
people don't speak like this, but you could say. :D
"Man lasu grāmatu labi"
And in Estonian that sentence was shown as:
"Ma lugesin raamatu läbi".
Though I was surprised at some differences, that there are no genders and time is determined just
by the context.
One notable similarity between Estonian and Latvian is intonation.
Some of the words are similar because both languages loaned them from German.
Latvian was also influenced by German, just like Estonian. Another reason for some similarities might be that in Latvian, there are a few words that have originally been loaned from the old Livonian language, which is related to Estonian and Finnish, isn't that so?
Fun fact as a native dutch speaker i could figure out a few words without reading your translations
That's interesting. In Finnish there is also 'läpi' which means basically the same as what you wrote.
Been meaning to start learning Finnish. Thanks, Paul.
As an Estonian - thank you for the video, very interesting indeed.
I was born in 92, as I grew up interest and need towards Finnish TV was already declining as we regained our independence. But it is true, a lot of people got to grips with Finnish. Nowadays young Estonians know English as a second language because of western infulence.
To me Finnish always sounded a bit round and soft compared to the more edgy Estonian pronounciations. But that is obviously not always true, more of a feeling.
You have certainly done your homework. As an Estonian, I really enjoyed this video. 👍
You didn’t mention Õ (and the lack of Õ in Finnish)! Also, I’m horrified of the idea that Finnish has FIVE infinitives! 😲 I have always had trouble explaining why we need even two... (I don’t think the difference can be explained by just the certain-not certain rule).
Oh yeah. When trying to pronounce the Estonian õ I suddenly realise how most foreigners must feel when trying to pronounce the Finnish ä, ö and y. :D
Actually some those 4 of 5 are present in Estonian, but only 2 considered as infinitives.
1st FIN is EST da-infinitive. istua = istuda
2nd FIN is EST des-form. tehdessä = tehes.
3rd FIN is EST ma-infinive. tekemään = tegema.
tekemässä = tegemas. tekemästä = tegemast. tekemättä = tegemata.
pitää tekemän = peab tegema.
Only tekemällä has no direct counterpart in EST.
4th FIN is EST mine-form. tekeminen = tegemine
5th FIN has no counterpart in EST.
@@aleksandrmuravja9341 Could tekemällä be translated as EST tegemaks? (not widely used, sounds bureaucrat, but definitely exists. My Finnish isn't good, but I get the feeling it's "needed to [do], as in EST "tegemaks korrektuure = to make corrections" or EST "nägemaks pean avama silmad = to see I need to open my eyes"
@@mirjam3553 Sometimes can be used, but in general not.
EST nägemaks = FIN näkemiseksi.
I found this explanation:
mällä-vorm kasutatakse juhul, kui vastame küsimustele: Mil viisil? ja Kuidas?
---
We use mällä-vorm to answer question: How?
ex: By going something.
For example:
FIN Syntymällä saa lapsi kansalaisuuden, jonta äiti on Suomen kansalainen.
EST Sünniga omandab Soome kodakondsuse laps, kelle ema on Soome kodanik.
ENG Child gets Finnish citizenship by birth, if his mother is Finland citizen.
Hungarian has 7 infinitives. One "basic" infinitive and one for each person and number. So the infinitive can be conjugated. Turkish and Kazakh has a similar feature.
Yay, I've always wanted a video comparing Finnish and Estonian for a long time, and Langfocus, you delivered!
Finnish is the most pleasant sounding language in my opinion. It sounds like a lullaby!
From an Arabic speaker.
I agree with you, I also think that Finnish is the most beautiful sounding language in the world! I'm sure vowel harmony is the reason for that.
I love the way the Estonian woman sounds in this video.
@@davidlynch1958 Women tend to sound lovelier than men
What do you think of sung Finnish (?? weird phrasing, Mim)? Jenni Vartiainen's _missä muruseni on_ is an incredible song and she sings it in the most beautiful Finnish ever! Well, all of her songs I'm pretty sure, has her sing in the most hypnotic and incredible Finnish.
@@davidlynch1958 stop being horny
The attention to detail and quality of this clip is truly awesome, even if i just scratches the topic. Very, very pleased to see such effort being made. Thank you!
I am a native Estonian speaker, never formally learned Finnish, travel to Finland often. Cannot really understand Finnish, much less speak it, but I feel like after every trip it becomes closer.
I'm a Finn who has studied Estonian a little bit and I find the false friends very interesting and funny too.
The worst false friend that I've come across has to be the word raiskata/raiskama. It means 'to waste' in Estonian but 'to rape' in Finnish. Although the meaning 'to waste' exists in Finnish too but it's very rare. One could say for example "älä raiskaa metsää" which means 'don't waste the forest'. Usually we Finns think about raping though if we hear the word since 'to rape' is the most common meaning.
Another word that Finns and Estonians have to be careful with is halpa/halb. The Finnish halpa means 'cheap' but the Estonian halb means 'bad'. I've heard some unlucky stories about Finnish people telling Estonians that they have cheap coffee and Estonians getting upset because they have understood that the coffee is bad.
The funniest false friend that I know is hallitus, which means 'government' in Finnish but 'mold' in Estonian. I guess this is because the words have different roots. The Finnish hallitus comes from the verb hallita which means 'to control/to rule' but the Estonian hallitus might come from the word hall which means 'grey'.
pulm - pulma is also funny :)
I always thought what the root for "hallitus" was in Finnish, but in Estonia we also have "haldama" which means "hallita" in Finnish
This reminded me that the grey seal has two names in Finnish: halli or harmaahylje. The name halli clearly has the same origin as the Estonian word for grey. Halli is also an old word or name for a dog, presumably a grey one.
I am well beyond sure the term "money rapist" is a thing somewhere, used for casino players and other people with poor money management skills.
@@Ulrich_dArth Casinos aren't a "thing" at least in Finland, not really. It's highly monopolized and controlled. There are slot machines absolutely everywhere, but true "casino" games like Poker, Blackjack? I know a single venue in Finland that sometimes hosts those, and the people involved are "professional" gamblers. So culturally, Finnish at least lacks any sort of Casino-related idioms or sayings. Instead: Most "gamblers" are regular shmos playing those slot machines, and it's highly addictive. And highly addictive personalities are not a good match with easy gambling opportunities. It's considered a problem; gambling addiction. Something very serious and not easily made fun of. Most of the people don't actually have the sort of money they play, which can ruin their entire lives. I'm sure there are sayings related to that, but i've never seen anything even slightly resembling humorous. More like lamenting the fact that some people suffer.
When they made it possible to play using your credit / debit card, i literally shook my head: They know it's a problem, and they want it to remain so they can profit from it.
I used to learn Estonian, and I loved it! This video might be a call for me to pick up Estonian again. Thanks to your explanation, I now realize how interesting the language actually is.
To me, Finnish and Estonian sound deceptively similar purely judging on their sounds, with Finnish exhibiting longer and more native words (like you mentioned that it's more conservative).
I love that Finnish is being more conservative, but that also makes its grammar appear more complicated, at least to me. I find Estonian just nice, not too overwhelming, quite easy to understand its grammar considering that I had to learn it myself as it's a very rare language, many people haven't heard about it. Even Finnish lessons are impossible to find in SEA.
Unfortunately, I don't know enough Estonian to help me understand Finnish, perhaps someday when I get better with Estonian, then I might try out Finnish, otherwise I get mixed up very easily.
They both seem unbelievably complicated. The list of cases alone was mindblowing.
Thank you, Paul, for explaining it all so well!
They are really not fundamentally more complicated than any other random language, it's just that their complexity manifests in their case system.
just wait for tsez
A language being complicated mostly depends on your native tongue, or the languages that you've already learnt.
Cases are probably the hardest thing in Finnish, but it simpler than many languages in some other ways. Pronounciation is almost exactly the same as writing, there are no genders, word order is often not essential for the meaning of a sentence etc. The reason it seems complicated is that it is not related to the well known languages, although there are a lot of germanic loans.
I don't think the number of cases is the main source of complexity in Estonian case system. Most of these function as English prepositions and are fixed suffixes added to genitive stem with no special cases. Learning all the Latin case names for them seems unneeded imo, it would be more natural to remember the corresponding questions that also end with these suffixes:
Genitive kelle?/mille? whose?/which?
kellel?/millel? on whom?/ on what?
kelles?/milles? in whom? / in what?
kellega?/millega? with whom? / with what?
....
However, there is no one to one correspondence with English prepositions and Estonian cases. As an Estonian I often have some trouble figuring out what preposition to use.
And genitive and partitive cases are VERY irregular and also have their interplay with plural form. Partitive could be especially difficult for English speakers as it often uses overlong syllables: having to make non-native phonetic distinctions (that are not spelled out in writing where genitive and partitive can look the same) to make non-native grammatic distinctions.
Jahaa! I always felt that difference in pronounce of those languages! Now I know - it`s a vowel harmony.
Thank you Paul!
Thanks Paul for a great video again! Finnish is my language but many years ago I studied some Estonian. However, my ability to understand Estonian is limited. I think exposure to the language may be sufficient to learn. There are a lot of Estonian people working in Finland and I think they master Finnish well with relatively small amount of formal study.
Dialectical differences in Finland are substantial. I come from southwestern part of Finland, where the local dialect is influenced by Estonian. I found fascinating, for exmple, that a sentence "Koer on köögis" is the same in my dialect and Estonian. In standard Finnish it is "Koira on keittiössä = The dog is in the kitchen."
Koer on köögis /koir om köögin (south Estonia)
I'm a Finn and Estonian is super easy (since I speak Swedish and German as well so the loan words and grammatical differences are clear) to understand. The hardest thing is the õ-sound.
Õ and Ö 😀
I've never met a Finn able to pronounce õ.
@@735337707 I have actually practiced õ for some time and my Finnish-Estonian friend said I sound like a native speaker.
Swedish and (especially) German helps so much in understanding Estonian.
I'm not sure how much being fluent in Finnish actually helps beyond the first baby steps, very quickly you come across grammatical differences (this video was a great help with that, actually) and this plethora of false friends.
Another thing to watch out for as a (very casual) learner is that Estonian writing is not as phonetic as Finnish writing; you won't get as good an approximation of how to pronounce something from the written form as you will with Finnish.
Luckily Estonians are very forgiving when it comes to foreigners mangling their language :-)
(I don't know if this is different if you are very obviously Finnish, ie trying to supplement with Finnish words.)
@@Asptuber I really appreciate your unique hypothesis beyond the scientific facts of linguistics. Innovational way of thinking.
I'm an Estonian and took a semester of Finnish last year. I'd say Finnish is rather easy to grasp for us, aside from those many, many annoying "false friends" in both vocabulary and in grammar. Also the fact that the Estonian-based Finnish course at my university is supposed to take you to level B2 in two semesters, but the English-based one takes you to A1 in the same time, speaks for itself.
You learn pretty quickly that "talo" in Finnish is "house", not farm (talu) and that "hallitus" is not a fungus, but their government. What was extremely difficult for me, though, was getting used to that the Finnish -ssa/-ssä (incessive case..?) and -lla/-llä (adessive case?) suffixes are not the same as the Estonian -se and -le suffixes. For example, "in the yogurt" in Finnish would be "jogurtissa", but in Estonian it would be "jogurtis", not "jogurtisse" (into the yogurt), which I would default to in speech, because they just sound more similar. This makes for weird sentences where instead of going to the shop (menen kauppaan) I am "going inside" the shop (menen kaupassa), which doesn't make any sense in neither English nor Finnish. This is just one example of many "false friends" in grammar.
Before taking the class, though, I wouldn't say I could understand Finnish. With some mental effort I could understand the theme of some Finnish text, but not any specifics. Even today, I need to translate every other word or so to get a detailed overview of, say, a news article.
Also fun fact, some say Finnish is more similar to Southern Estionian dialects such as Setu/Seto and Võru/Võro, which are spoken in regions much further away from Finland, than standard Estonian itself. I don't speak the dialect so I cannot confirm this myself.
I can wholeheartedly subscribe to the false friends, remember when I went to Tartu for a company meeting and after all was said and done went for a walk wanting to buy something to eat. So of course I wonder into Rimi buy couple of pastries and what at the time I thought was sour milk but later turned out to be just regular milk... *piim* does not equal *piimä*
You could absolutely say "jogurtis" (or "jugurtis") when speaking Finnish but it's the informal spoken language version
@@TheGTRacer97 "Täs jogurtis on kärpänen!" "Mä meen kauppaan." Ihan kauheeta et ulkomaalaiset joutuu opettelemaan näitä kaksin kerroin, varsinki tää puhekielen ja kirjakielen erottelu sais mut hulluks.
@@xYarbx Old times when you shipped piim from Tallinn to Helsinki, Piim became Piimä when it reached the shore :) No refrigerator :D
Could it be that those Southern Estonian dialects are closer to that now extinct language of Livonian? Somehow livonian sounds similar to Finnish, although very much unintelligible. As a native speaker from South-Western Finland (Ala-Satakunta) I got my Aha-moment when someone explained that Ehtoo = Õhtust. I can also affirm that Suvi = Kesä = Summer. Those two words (evening = ehtoo = õhtust and Summer =suvi) are not actually in any way archaic in Turku region. Estonian has a very beautiful sound!
Im estonian and kull means owl in estonia so when i was in finland on a trip with many people i saw a owl and screamed kull...so yee everyone thought there was a pp on the tree
Hii! No, kull does not mean owl. The way to say owl is öökull (öö as in night and kull I think is a diff animal, idk) and the way to pronounce ö is like saying [ohh] in a coughing manner. [Oohh-ku-ll] or that's how I say it. Hope that helps!
@@maple9523 Kull is a general flavour of bird of prey, usually non-coastal. (Eagles, hawks, what have you. As most folk-y names, you don't _really_ need the species-level distinction day-to-day) Owls are öökull, indeed, but I can see a group of Finns getting exited over the 'kull' and entirely forgetting about the 'öö' :D
Nice
I'm not Estonian, I'm actually American, but I like seeing countries like Estonia being talked about, because many people don't even know they exist and maybe it's the language lover in me, but there's always more to learn :)
I think that over hear in Europe most people know Estonia as a country. Pointing it on a map might be a bit of a challenge, but I think most Europeans know the country by name.
@@XEinstein In America, if you asked someone what Estonia was, they'd say anything but a country
@@daniellacardente5755 well, the stereotype is that if in the United States you ask someone what Iowa is they haven't a clue either. 😉
Thanks for saying that! As an Estonian with American relatives, I always appreciate when someone from such a huge country from the other side of the Atlantic shows love for our small republic's culture/language :)
@@daniellacardente5755 as an Estonian, lol!
There are also some phonetic differences.
- Estonian has one more vowel, õ. Example pronunciation at 3:44. Finnish y and Estonian ü are the same sound.
- Estonian has three phoneme lengths: short, half-long, overlong. Finnish has two: short and long.
- While it may seem that Estonian uses a lot more voiced consonants, that’s not actually true. Because Estonian has three phoneme lengths, they need a way to differentiate between them in writing. Because real voiced consonants are rare/nonexistent in Estonian, they use b, g, and d to mark the short length of p, k, and t (example “lugesin” and “läbi” at 10:57. Notice how Paul mispronounces “läbi” with a voiced consonant at 11:20.). A single p, k, t is a half-long consonant (again 10:57, “raamatu”), and a double pp, kk, tt is an overlong consonant (example 6:24).
How are the three lengths indicated in writing for vowels?
@@seneca983 Short is one letter, halflong and overlong are both two letters. You have to know which is which word-by-word (or in some cases, declension-by-declension) basis.
@@Aakkosti: Are there any word pairs which would differ only by vowel length (half-long vs. overlong) such that there's no difference in spelling?
@@seneca983 Yes. For example, “kool” (school) has half long oo in “kooli” (genitive) declension, but overlong in “kooli” (partitive). Go to sonaveeb.ee (an Estonian web dictionary), search for “kool”, then click on the audio buttons under “sõnavormid” to hear the difference. AFAIK, Estonians can infer from context what was meant even if we foreigners pronounce the length wrong.
As a native Hungarian speaker who took some Finnish classes during his university years, I loved the grammar part. The structure and the logic is extremely similar even the pronunciation was an easy deal but on that note I can't say the same about the vocabulary. Ugh that was challenging. 😅
Our languages distantiated and evolved so differently that an average Hungarian speaker would not catch a word of Finnish. Except very basic words like blood or tree. I would love to resume my Finnish studies one day for sure. You should record a video of Hungarian vs. Finnish vs. Estonian as there'd be loads of stuff to discuss 🇪🇪🇫🇮🇭🇺
ive been reading a lot of wiktionary and comparing hungarian and finnish words, i think ’mértékegység’ and ’mittayksikkö’ sound a bit similiar
@@VSaccount Yes, we have those words hehe I wish we had more in common and we should learn each other's languages and deepen again the common heritage we have/had. 😉
Up voting this post. It'd be a very interesting watch.
Igen Istvan. grammar= Saksas, Saksassa= Németországon…petöfiszándorül (-ul?)> saksamaal, saksanmaalla= németországban🤔,n-ba= saksast, saksasta? 😀 nem tudom, en tiedä, ma ei tea. (tudja=tietää=teada) . észtül= tööööööbik= työyösatakieli (f) mag=? (työ/töö= munka yö/öö= éj satakieli (”száznyelv” 🦜😃)ööbik= csalogány (=petturi,pettur)…