Here you'll find Estonian in a nutshell so to speak - Estonian 101. Use it to get familiar with basic principles of Estonian language, or to recall what you've already learned.

While preparing this material, I didn't want to create one more textbook but complement existing textbooks and online materials. Altough I truly respect hard work of any textbook publishers, I note that too many share approach that the learner has a luxury to go to a language school with 20 other students with whom they can practice all ins and outs of my wonderful language. Also the authors tend to slam poor students with the variety and subtleties far too early. It is good to know many different ways of greeting but in a real life situation you say hello and then move on! The result of this approach   is that the most of Estonian students throw their books out of the window - ah, someone else may find it and try to learn and then throw the book away again and never want to learn this language.

Ok, there's a thing that no Estonian teacher can get around, namely that Estonian is harder to learn - on 1 to 10 scale English would score 2, Estonian perhaps 7-8. But this is based on the people who think it is possible to learn a new language within 2 days. That is bit foolish - new things take time! And practice and patience do lead to wonderful results.

As a mother of two American kids I wanted to make sure that they wouldn't give up on their Estonian heritage and I am proud to tell that they are speaking my langauge - their mother's tongue! They still make mistakes here and there yet the perfection is not the point, but an ability to understand others and be understood in Estonian. Over the years my materials have grown to facilitate the needs of the students I have have worked with. I know that for adults more detailed grammatical explanations are in order, they want to see the big picture. And that's how my material should be approached: as an overview, not a course in itself.

Some of the pages contain multimedia - videos in WMV and audios in MP3 format. Unfortunately these pages upload slow. Sometimes it takes more than 1 click to get things open. Hopefully you don't mind as I am better in Estonian language than in computer language (hey, any help in how to improve the technical side would be greatly appreciated!)

By the way, all feedback is welcome!  Drop a line and tell if this material has been any use for you.

Hope to hear soon from you,

Airi Enge