Is Estonian Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)

Estonian is a very difficult language for English speakers to learn. It is very different from English and with a lot of complex grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, it will take time and commitment to learn the language. The rewards are well worth the effort, but you’ll need to prepare yourself for a challenging journey.

Estonian is only very distantly related to English, indeed so distantly related that it is probably more useful simply to say the two are not related at all.

Learning it is going to be an uphill battle to say the least—at the same time, though, many have learned it before you, and your ability to learn is the same as theirs!

Let’s find out more.

How difficult is Estonian to learn?

Estonian is considered among the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn.

It is considerably easier than the most difficult languages, but nonetheless, there is no sugarcoating that learning Estonian will take an awful lot of time and commitment.

It’s important to stress that learning languages is never easy, and even the “easiest” language to learn is still only easy in relative terms.

Even in these relative terms, Estonian is still very difficult, so you can see that learning Estonian is going to be very challenging for an English speaker.

Understanding the way languages are related to one another is a key point in understanding why one language is more difficult to learn than another.

With the exception of only a handful of languages, virtually every language spoken in Europe is Indo-European.

This is an extremely wide family, naturally, extending also into India and Asia. Estonian is one of these few non-Indo-European languages.

English is a Germanic language, and Estonian is Uralic, and ultimately Southern Finnic.

For all intents and purposes, English and Estonian are not related at all, and are about as different from each other as languages can be.

So, you have virtually no leg up in terms of the relationship between the two languages.

Even closely related languages, again, are difficult to learn, but learning Estonian will be learning entirely from the ground up.

With all this said, many have of course learned Estonian and you are just as capable as they are, so don’t be discouraged.

Nothing that’s worth doing is ever easy, but you nonetheless must steel yourself for a very long period of study and an even longer period of absorbing the language if you want to gain full fluency.

How long, exactly, should this take, then?

How long will it take to learn Estonian?

It will naturally vary from person to person, but in general you can expect to spend around 44 weeks studying Estonian to get to the point of being able to conduct yourself in your day-to-day life in Estonian.

The FSI categorizes languages on how difficult, and thus how much study they will take, to learn for English speakers.

There are five categories within this ranking, with category five languages being the hardest to learn. Estonian is a category four language, meaning you can expect to spend around 44 weeks on the initial period of study.

This, though, is far from the end. If you are looking to become fully fluent in the language, ideally at this point you would then go and immerse yourself in the language for at least 3-5 years.

At the end of this period, as long as you have continued to be diligent in your use of the language, you may have achieved something approaching full fluency.

Again, this can be different for every person, but in general if you are committed and persevere, then 5 years should be the most anyone needs to have a full, virtually complete grasp on the language.

Is Estonian a dying language?

Estonian is not a dying language by any metric or meaning of that term. UNESCO has its own classification for the preservation state of languages, and with around 1.2 million active, native speakers of Estonian, the language is not even considered to be endangered.

It is the official language not only of Estonia itself, but is also one of the officially recognized languages of the European Union.

So, if you are concerned that learning Estonian would not be beneficial, you have nothing to worry about it.

It is a thriving language with a rich and deep culture and the rewards of learning it are more than proportional to the effort.

Is Estonian or Finnish harder to learn?

For an English speaker, there is not likely to be much in it, but overall Estonian is generally regarded as the more difficult language to learn.

The FSI ranks Estonian as the fifth most difficult and Finnish as the sixth, so as you can see they are practically the same.

Both are going to be very difficult for an English speaker to learn, and in fact both are very closely related to one another.

Both are very hard, and if you were to learn both it’s unlikely you would notice a difference in the difficulty.

Estonian is a fascinating language in many ways, being one of the few languages spoken in Europe which does not belong to the Indo-European family.

It may not be the most widely spoken, but it is nonetheless an immensely rewarding language to learn in countless ways.

Learning languages is never easy, so this will be even more of a struggle—but if you’ve got the commitment, then you’ll be rewarded for your effort.

More in Learning Languages

• Is Afrikaans Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is Arabic Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is Bulgarian Hard To Learn? (Revealed!)
• Is Chinese Hard To Learn? (Answered!)
• Is Croatian Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is Danish Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is Dutch Hard To Learn? (Answered!)
• Is English Hard To Learn? (Answered!)
• Is Estonian Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is French Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content)
• Is German Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content)
• Is Hindi Hard To Learn? (Answered!)
• Is Italian Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is Japanese Hard To Learn? (Explained!)
• Is Korean Hard To Learn? (Explained!)
• Is Latin Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is Latvian Hard To Learn? (Answered!)
• Is Norwegian Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is Portuguese Hard To Learn? (Find Out!)
• Is Russian Hard To Learn? (Answered!)
• Is Spanish Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is Swedish Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is Tagalog Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)
• Is Welsh Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)