First the things Estonian and English grammar share. Mostly, we have the same word categories as English. By word categories I mean nouns, verbs, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, interjections and conjunctions. Besides prepositions, we also have postpositions - something that follows the main word in the word phrase.

Here are some basic differences:

We don’t express gender by special grammatical means. I guess the Estonians have had gender equality from early on - or at least the idea thereof! It surely makes translating into Estonian easier. Instead of dealing with 'he', 'she' or 'it', we just say 'tema' for women and men, people, animals and things alike.  Do I hear a happy applause?

When it comes to verbs, we have less tenses than English. We don't have present continuous (for example, I am watching), past continuous (I was watching) or anything to such effect (I have or had been watching etc.).

Instead we keep it simple: we have simple present (I watch), simple past (I watched), present perfect (I have watched) and past perfect (I had watched). And we don't have any future forms - we use contextual means to express the idea. In a sense it is simpler but may take some time to get used to. But the benefit is clear - less verb-iage!

While in English verbs have ending for 3rd singular person only in present tense (sings, laughs, etc.), Estonian uses distinct endings for each person – singular and plural alike – in simple present and simple past tense.

While you in English is like a blanket term that is used to no matter if you are addressing one or one hundred people, in Estonian we have sina to address one person and teie to more than one. So that is an additional thing to learn.

Estonian is an inflective language which means that grammatical features such as number, case, person, mood, or tense are expressed by the addition of respective indicators to the word, as in English dogs from dog, or by changing the form of a base, as in English spoke from speak. This is probably the trickiest thing about Estonian - the words may have multiple forms. Scrabble players would surely like that, wouldn't they?

To indicate relation of a substantive to a verb, an adjective, or another substantive, English uses prepositions, as at, by, with, from, and in regard to. Though there is number of prepositions and postpositions, Estonian uses mostly grammatical cases for this function.

In noun phrase all words agree in grammatical case (ilus naine – pretty woman : ilusale naisele – to a pretty woman).