Estonian: Eesti Tere / Tere Jälle / EnE / KnK / KS: A0-B2 by barrybounce02

Community-Created Courses Estonian
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Hello!

Now that I know the forums exist, this can be a place to talk about the course Eesti Tere / Tere Jälle / EnE / KnK / K… - by barrybounce02 - Memrise

While this is a monster course and could seem a bit unwieldy (especially when downloading it on the app!), having everything in one place means that if you move between books Memrise should only try to teach you words that you haven’t already learnt elsewhere.

I’m always particularly grateful to receive details of any errors that need fixing, or inconsistencies / duplications that can be clarified :slight_smile:

Course norms are that (unless otherwise indicated):

  • Verbs are given in the ma, da and “I” forms, always in full
  • Three noun forms are given, always in full
  • Where a word has a couple of similar and equally valid spellings I generally use the more complicated / longer one
  • Diminutives are increasingly being given with the -kene -kese -kest endings and indicated as diminutives, and I am changing over to this.
  • In order to maintain consistency across books and differentiate words with similar meanings, the English translation may be more specific than is in your book.

If you don’t know why you should be learning three forms of each word yet bear with it, you’ll soon know you definitely should have been! Your book is no more than a few chapters away from springing this unwelcome surprise on you, and starting it from the beginning means you won’t need to go back and relearn stuff.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been adding individual chapters in Keel Selgeks and fixing bugs in the vocabulary from that book. Today I’ve added and corrected chapters 15-17.

Prior to this my last big update was the EKI A1 and A2 wordlists (in frequency order).

Other things in the pipeline are:

  • More consistent presentation of numbers (I just haven’t decided how to do this yet…)
  • Adding the vocabulary from KeeleKlikk (I have the list, and am separating it into units)
  • Adding the EKI B1 word list by frequency (about 3300 words are already in the course, and I have a list of around another 1000 needing expanded into three forms and translated
  • More Saame Tuttavaks and Tulduva chapters will come (as I work them).

The books included in the course are:

TERE! 978-9949-9231-0-6 TERE! (inglise keele baasil)
TERE JÄLLE! 978-9949-9524-8-9 TERE JÄLLE! (Inglise keele baasil)
My favourite books, with good grammar explanations, really practical topics, and well chosen vocabulary. Great for self study. If you did these books and Keeleklikk you would definitely not need to be scared of the A2 exam (early editions said they took you to about A2 level, and later editions have the same content and suggest somewhere into B1 level)! Also available in Russian base, and there is also a third book Tere Taas available for Russian speakers. I really hope it becomes available for English speakers!!!

E Nagu Eesti 978-9949-33-230-4 E nagu Eesti
Undoubtedly much much better than the really quite hopeless first edition that it replaced, though I still feel that it is perhaps a pity that this seems to be the most commonly used text in classrooms! Entirely in Estonian, with some diagrammatical explanations of grammar. Many people find it helpful, so the fact that I always have to reach for explanations from elsewhere could be me not being much of a linguist. The first print run described it as an A2 book, but later this was upgraded to B1 (with no change to content). I haven’t sat the B1 exam so can’t speak for this, but I can’t say I feel it offered a lot more than what saw me through the A2 exam (though it was a very comfortable A2 exam). It contains about 1500 words, which is a lot less than other B1 texts and certainly a lot less than the EKI B1 wordlist, though I guess you would never sit the B1 exam having only practiced from one source. It has a lot of exercises, and teachers that don’t like the rest of the book often use it just for these.

K nagu Kihnu 9789949962280 follows on from E nagu Eesti, and says that it is B2 level. The glossary contains around 1000 words, about half of which the EKI dictionary identifies as being at B1 level, the remainder split between B2 and C1. I’ve just started to learn the vocabulary (which I do before starting to work through the book), so can’t say much about the book at the moment!

Estonian Textbook: Juhan Tulduva 9780933070547
While written by spy for the wrong side and more than slightly out of date in terms of content, the book with the best grammar explanations by far.

Keel Selgeks Estonian only text 9789985217825, Glossary, translation of first five chapters, and exercises for translation into Estonian 9789985217832 (also available in other languages). Grammar explanation 9789985217863 (also available in other languages).

An excellent B1 book that purports to be suitable for beginners and would be if it wasn’t fatally flawed in a sort of “what were they thinking?” kind of way. Once in possession of three books with more than 500 pages you still lack glossaries for the first 5 chapters (the appendices book has them translated fully into English, which is cumbersome and not really the same for learning), and answers to all the questions in the book. With these fixed it could be the best of all the books available, but other than that it might be the book that you’d only want to use if you were doing the University of Tartu online courses that use it. Says it’s a B1 book, and with almost 4000 words it seems to me much more like that level than the others.

Grammar book could be excellent companion if you are struggling with E nagu Eesti.

Saame Tuttavaks! 978-9985-71-890-2
A really pretty book that I really got into because it seemed much easier than every other Estonian book. Unfortunately this is because it is; it hides grammar from you in a way that just left me confused, not understanding what was going on and with no real way to progress other than to start at the beginning with a better book! While the publisher is no more, copies in Russian, Finnish and German can also be found hanging around from time to time, especially in https://www.raamatukoi.ee/ . I’d avoid them though.

Other things that might help you on your Estonian journey:

https://www.keeleklikk.ee/
Free online course for complete beginners working towards A2, level by the Estonian government, with tutor support. I think it’s amazing and the best thing ever, and the single biggest contributor to passing the A2 state exam, but some people (who are probably better at languages than me…) find it repetitive. A lot of people criticising it will be thinking of the days it was flash only, which is no longer the case.

Esileht
Free online course to give more practice at A2 level. It’s designed for people with hearing impairments, which makes it particularly good for mastering pronunciation without a teacher. The exercises are of a type quite similar to what was in the A2 exam. Glossary is in Russian.

https://www.keeletee.ee/
Free online B1 level course. I’m also a huge fan.

https://winterschool.tlu.ee/
https://summerschool.tlu.ee/
3 weeks of in person (in normal times) classes in Tallinn in January and July, well priced, cheap university accommodation available, relaxed atmosphere and etc. Has been my summer and winter holidays for a few years, and I’ve met a lot of the heaviest users of this course there more than once, which I think is a good sign!

https://www.folkuniversitetet.ee/

Excellent and keenly priced in-person and online courses, and by far my favourite course. I’m currently doing the B1 course online, and unlike many Estonian courses it does not seem to be pitched at linguists. They use their own really excellent materials that appear to be designed to match the state exams, cover grammar through a lot of oral work, and move at a slower more repetitive pace that makes it more suited to non-linguists than any other course I’ve done :slight_smile:

Tartu University also has a summer school, which I gather is a lot more intensive and less of a holiday!

Facebook Group: Foreigners Learning Estonian Foreigners Learning Estonian | Facebook

Lots of native speakers and more advanced speakers will quickly answer your questions about Estonian!

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This week I’ve corrected some inconsistencies and errors that a user found in the latest chapters of Tere Jalle. Always really grateful to receive any corrections!

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Hi barrybounce, Thanks for putting these courses together. I came across a word that’s confusing: varjupaik, varjupaikpaiga, varjupaikpaika+ “shelter” in lvl 30. It seems like a mistake?

I was reading through your forum intro, and a group of words stick out to me as needing clarification. Tasa/ tasane/ vait/ vaikne have very similar definitions. Maybe there’s a little more to the definition that can be given?

Anyway, thanks!

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Hello!

Thanks for your message. I’ve fixed varjupaik, and I’ll have a look at those other words at the weekend :slight_smile:

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Hey there, Barry. I recently began learning Estonian and came across your course and have considered it since yours is one of the few that actually lists multiple forms for each word. However, upon beginning to read Estonian Textbook by Juhan Tuldava, I noticed according thereto that four base forms are required for full declension of nouns: nominative singular, genitive singular, partitive singular and partitive plural—rather than just three, and that the passive perfect participle is required for a total of four verb forms as well. Does your list somehow imply a workaround for this, such that those fourth forms aren’t necessary as the book claims after all?

On a small sidenote, I noticed that Tuldava’s book outlines perhaps the most comprehensive grammar of any Estonian textbook. Considering this, are there by chance any grammatical concepts K nagu Kihnu presents that Estonian Textbook doesn’t, or could one just use it for its vocabulary (though ET also has a long glossary itself) and reach B2 level sufficiently by carrying over ET’s grammar to K nagu Kihnu? Thank you; I just thought these questions could help through clarity of what to best spend time learning.

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Excellent questions…!

… to which I’m afraid I don’t know the answers, as you’re trying to get to a level just above where I’m currently at :frowning: Maybe try the Facebook group “Foreigners Learning Estonian” and see if someone can help you there?

As regards the first question, I’m nervously awaiting finding out the answer myself. The books that I used most often when I started using Memrise (Tere, Tere Jalle and Keel Selgeks) didn’t give four forms in their glossaries, so I assumed that was the way to go. I’m now aware that Tulduva, EnE and KnK do. I’m currently at the stage where I’m getting introduced to the partitive plural myself, mainly by trying to work out what it would be based on groups of similar types of words in a similar way to how Ch31 of Tulduva explains it (and that chapter 8 of the grammar guide accompanying Keel Selgeks teaches in more detail). I don’t know if this is a good way, or indeed if it may be a way that is viable at lower levels but not higher levels!

I have no idea about the levels. As I mentioned above I didn’t feel EnE took me much beyond the level of the A2 exam (albeit one that I wasn’t worried by), and in the changed world I’ve not been able to get to Estonia to find out what B1 is like!

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Cool deal, and upon further inspection, it actually seems that the reason those other books never mentioned the partitive plural may be because no additional noun forms are derived therefrom. In other words, memorising it is only useful to the effect of knowing that form itself, unlike the genitive and partitive singular, which together construct the remainder of the singular and plural cases except for the partitive singular. Even as it is only one case, however, I personally still find it a very important in common speech, being used even in everyday sentences such as “Did you get the books?” and thus highly necessary to learn. As for the -tud participle, since it would seem more significant as other verb forms are derived from it, my best guess is that the authors just considered it too complex to be mentioned in the other books as beginner-level ones, though I think they still should have mentioned it to prevent confusion when confronting the form later on.

As another aside concerning vocabulary, I figured I’d share with you that the MostUsedWords frequency dictionary series for Estonian (here) could be highly valuable as it lists 10,000 words in total, far more than any textbook and which would grant you a vocabulary on the magnitude of many native speakers, especially for smaller languages like Estonian with smaller active vocabularies (by lemma count). While I am unsure of whether the dictionary lists all the proper forms for each word as I cannot locate a preview for it anywhere having only seen it on Amazon, you could always just search each lemma in a sort of word decliner online if not. Additionally, its editor’s name is Kristjan Mark, an apparently Estonian name, which likely assures that all of the words are natively defined rather than loosely translated from English or Russian. Lastly, here is a free alternative of a frequency dictionary online with all the words you can possibly need (here), but I am skeptical of its accuracy.

Unsurprisingly, the most arduous and time-consuming component of Estonian is memorisation of the 4 or so forms for each word, but aside from that, its learning process does indeed seem to be more logical and straightforward than that of haphazard Indo-European languages like Russian or Polish with less systematic grammar. And while in Estonian most words are in effect exceptions as you must memorise multiple forms for each, they are much more consistent exceptions as they just involve the same word forms over and over such that they become naturally ingrained in the learning process, and thus easier to acquire. I figured some extra motivation could only help. Happy learning!

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The partitive plural is certainly something that, one way or another, one needs to learn at some point! The only question is how to get beyond that point where you carefully construct sentences that avoid it :smiley:

The -tud participle is more curious. Only Tulduva includes it in the glossary otherwise than as a separate headword. Based on the grammar guide for Keel Selgeks it seems easy to learn how to construct (where “easy” has a special definition that only appears in the context of learning Estonian).

For wordlists I would always recommend the following:

(They don’t include all forms, but I have them in a spreadsheet and looking them up and getting them ready for Memrise is one of my current projects! )

For B2 and C1 wordlists you can use:

https://sonaveeb.ee/teacher-tools/#/vocabulary

My working spreadsheet has about 15,700 entries for the words in the Memrise course and the words identified as being up to C1 level.

Of these about 7,600 words have incomplete entries. Of those incomplete entries about 4,300 words have three forms that have been automatically extracted from [ÕS] Eesti õigekeelsussõnaraamat ÕS 2018 and need checked (and the remainder don’t have three forms), and 4,600 have translations that were automatically extracted and need checked / disambiguated.

I have about 1000 entries to complete that relate to B1 words, and 3,300 that relate to B2 level words.

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Wow, that is one comprehensive list. Just three questions:

  1. The eki.ee documents list a table on page 5 of 34 that displays the wordcounts of each level through C1, so why aren’t the B2 and C1 lists available via that document format? And since the sõnaveeb website lists the A1-B1 words as well, couldn’t I use just that one instead of the documents at all?

  2. The documents state the C1 level consists of 12,225 words, but on sõnaveeb 12,578 are listed. Since both websites are part of the same organisation with the standardised wordlists, what is the reason for the small disparity in the word counts between them?

  3. 12,000+ words is an awful lot, and I have heard from many people that 4,000-5,000 words would suffice for B2 level, and that 10,000 is usually sufficient for C1. Especially as Estonian is a language you would expect to have a smaller vocabulary extent due to lower global presence, do you believe that the wordcounts are perhaps slightly exaggerated as the requirements for the respective levels? Since virtually every word involves acquisition of multiple forms, the total number of forms necessary to learn among those 12,000 words is probably in excess of 40,000. It is hard to fathom how one would be supposed to learn just that many in order to become fully functional in the language while in many other languages you could learn only one form of the same number of words (or even fewer) and with a limited number of exceptions (i.e. within a defined scope of words, not applying to every noun, verb and adjective). Don’t get me wrong; I think it is still plausible to learn, but while this volume of information might be sensible for an academic, I just thought I’d inquire as to whether it is actually typical for an ordinary native speaker to know that many words, the idea of which shocks me as an ordinary English speaker knows roughly 12,000 words actively, but which require only one form to derive the others. My best guess in the case of most Estonian speakers is that they would be familiar with that many words passively if listened to or read, but wouldn’t necessarily be able to iterate all ~4 base forms of every single one, and so would just iterate certain ideas with alternate word choice in their own speaking or writing.

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1 / 2 - I used the Pdfs where available as they were easiest for me to work with, and then SV for the remainder. I didn’t compare similar lists so don’t know what the differences are, but they appear to be statistically minor and people could use whatever suited them best!

  1. I’m very much not a linguist and was brought to learning modern languages by love of Estonia rather than any linguistic ability at all. I did Latin at school and had little other prior experience of learning languages. (Though I’ve since widened my horizons)

I can only comment about the A2 exam, but for that at least the wordlist was definitely something that I would recommend people cover. I went into the exam not knowing about the wordlist, but having covered almost all of it through what I had done. I had a very comfortable exam and passed 76-90%, 91-100%, 91-100%, 60-75%. The 60-75% was the result of an incredibly awkward conversation about a picture of someone learning the flute where it was abundantly clear that neither me nor my speaking partner knew the word for a flute (it’s flööt, btw :smiley: ), which wouldn’t have happened if we had been through the A2 wordlist in advance.

To me it therefore seems to me that it would be a good idea to treat the lists seriously, but of course it depends on your motivation and there’s also an argument that too much in excess of a pass mark is wasted effort!

In response to the rest of your comments…

a) Estonian really is one of the harder languages to learn :frowning: I’ve since started Dutch and it’s such a breeze by comparison!

b) One thing to note about the forms of words is that there are actually groups of nouns and verbs that form patterns, and technically it would be possible to learn them that way ( see EESTI ÕIGEKEELSUSSÕNARAAMAT ÕS 2018 for examples of the groups, but without an explanation of how words fall into them ) For all normal people this would be a terrible way of starting doing things, however once you have maybe 5000 or so words under your belt you’ll start to find that it’s easier to learn words as you just sort of subconsciously start to know what the other forms will probably be, and can link them to similar words.

c) In certain contexts your language would of course have to be perfect, but you can get ever so far just making up partitive plurals and letting people work out what you meant. Whenever I’ve talked to people (including strangers) in a social context they’ve always encouraged me to guess and move on, rather than interrupt the flow of conversation trying to work it out.

d) I’m assuming that asking Estonians grammar questions would go as well when other people ask us about English grammar (ie not well)! They probably have enough experience to gain an intuition as to what the groups of similar words are?

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Yes, I actually realised before viewing your response that I had somewhat overstated the difficulty of acquiring the four forms. Since there are numerous sub-patterns according to shared endings within groups of words, you only need to memorise a handful (albeit still many) of extrapolative “paradigms.” Viewed this way, Estonian can just be considered as based on an extended set of rules rather than particularly irregular (though it still does have exceptions, but which are probably mostly among more common words [precisely why “to be” is irregular in virtually every European language] and not overly frequent overall), rather than “exception-ridden,” per se, as I had previously thought.

An example of such a group would be formed by the ending -raamat. Raamat, the base word, has a certain declension paradigm that can be induced into compound words with the word as their ending, such as sõnaraamat. Hence, the number of word forms you probably need to learn for an alleged C1 level (even though I think you wouldn’t need quite 12,000 words so long as you knew 8,000-10,000 that were strictly as per frequency—not consisting of, for instance, names of rare plants or birds that you might have hardly ever heard of in English) probably wouldn’t be nearly 40,000. Additionally, there are some parts of speech which you only have to worry about learning one form for words thereof, although the vast majority of words are still nouns, verbs or adjectives. You can also memorise the forms more easily by just memorising the four forms on a single-entity basis as if it were still a single word. For instance, raamat would be memorised as raamatuutuid, but you would still have to mentally distinguish the declensions between the proper blocks: raamat|u|ut|uid instead of raamat|u|utu|id.

As for the difficulty of the language, Estonian is often viewed as being more grammatically irregular than its sister language Finnish, but that is largely because what people consider exceptions are really just sub-rules as mentioned above. On the other hand, I have heard that Finnish consists of considerably more base rules than Estonian (See Piret Kivi’s answer), which should balance out the overall grammatical complexity between the two, and because Estonian underwent heavy Germanic influence resulting in more recognizable vocabulary and has slightly shorter and thus less overwhelming words on average than Finnish, it should be somewhat easier to learn for an English speaker.

Furthermore, I realise just how much I commend you for linking me that wordlist. Hardly any languages have viable wordlists containing over 10,000 words, so one that comprehensive was highly unexpected for a language like Estonian. Thanks indeed, but I do have two questions: for each language level, sõnaveeb displays all the words pertaining to that level, but by default only does so alphabetically. Is there a way to view the words instead by frequency within the level? That would be very useful. Also, you said that for your wordlist on Memrise you manually extracted the three forms you’ve listed for some of the words from that standalone declination tool, but I noticed that sõnaveeb actually lists the 14 cases in singular and plural for each word upon clicking on it, so is there a specific reason you rather chose to use the decliner, just out of curiosity? And on one final note, a very minor quirk alongside extracting the four forms is the need to check the genitive plural and illative (singular for sure, but I don’t know about the illative plural), since in rare instances those cases are also formed irregularly, but just checking for what the majority of the time isn’t so shouldn’t be a major burden.

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In terms of Estonian glossaries, what counts as a word is also a bit of a movable feast. For example in a simple book forms derived from structures you haven’t yet learned how to create often turn up as a headword in their own right.

I did a year of Finnish after many years of Estonian, so obviously I would have found it an easier experience as I had both a grammatical structure and a vocabulary with a certain similarity to relate it to! It seemed to me to be perhaps a slightly perfected and less frustrating variant of Estonian, or perhaps I haven’t done enough of it (about A1 level only) to become aware of its unique frustrations!

Re wordlists: sadly SV doesn’t have frequencies, but if you want to explore the topic more some modest data processing could link many of the words to the resources such as https://www.cl.ut.ee/ressursid/sagedused1/failid/lemma_kahanevas.txt that you can find at The Frequency List of Estonian Literary Language

While SV is generally a superior resource, it is beyond my limited computing skill and modest budget to extract the different forms from it automatically (I had some far more competent computer types look at it, and apparently it’s genuinely difficult). I used a modestly priced paid for tool to extract the words from [ÕS] Eesti õigekeelsussõnaraamat ÕS 2018 , which being an older site was simpler to work with.

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Okay, that frequency list you linked is actually what I had linked to you several days ago and that I was considering using as the basis of my vocabulary! Since I reckon that wordlist is roughly identical to the frequency wordlists on the documents up to the extent of the documents, but also extends far beyond the B1 level with even more vocabulary by frequency, I may just manually search the words from that list on Sõnaveeb, and manually enter the necessary forms into a Memrise course of my own. That will be a big task, but doing it by about 30-50 words a day should be relatively easygoing, and moreover, entering in the forms myself would only help in improving the retention and familiarity of the vocabulary before I even review them officially. Combine that immense volume of words with a mastery of the grammar from Tuldava’s book, which is essentially a list of 408 useful points, and that is a thorough recipe for fluency—that is, once you become proficient at applying the information in spoken form, but you would still at least be a fluent typist before then!

By the way, just as a curious inquiry, what exactly was it that triggered your interest in Estonia? Do you by chance have ancestry that originated from there or family who live there currently? I personally became enthralled with the country because a lot of people have talked about Finland and the Scandinavian countries, and Estonia felt to me almost like a mini version of Finland that seemed to be overlooked, which piqued my curiosity of it as a sort of “hidden gem,” and because I have always enjoyed exploring things (places, ideas, hobbies) with a “route less taken” or “away from the herd” type of status, which is actually why I have planned to move away from the U.S. in general whether to Estonia or elsewhere, though now I am mostly confident in Estonia. Do you by chance live in the U.S. and plan to move to Estonia eventually, and are perhaps a teenager currently? My reason for asking is because I would be quite surprised to encounter someone in a precisely similar position as myself, though I am 20 years old. :slight_smile:

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Ah right; I think I saw “sceptical about accuracy” and moved on! Let me work on it then! I’ll match the list to what I already have from the other wordlists and see how they compare! I suspect the answer is that it’ll be different but it won’t be wrong, as for this sort of thing there can be many correct options!

I’m double your age, which puts me at the perfect age for The Baltic Way to have happened just at the right time for it to be one of the first world events that I remember seeing on the news, and at perhaps the best possible age for a 300 mile human chain to fully capture my imagination.

I had first noticed the Baltic states on the map before because they were marked differently on the map; red border and “WESTERN COUNTRIES DO NOT RECOGNISE THE ILLEGAL ANNEXATION OF ESTONIA, LITHUANIA AND LATVIA BY THE USSR”, but this marked them out as places you didn’t want to go to or be interested in. When I saw pictures of the The Baltic Way I was particularly taken by how beautiful the countries it was happening in were.

Through my childhood the internet started to become a thing and it started to become easier to see just how beautiful they were, and also just how quickly Estonia in particular was developing and improving. I wanted to see all the Baltic states, but my first holiday alone was to Estonia in 2002 (and certainly not with parental blessing, as they thought I was making an insane trip to some weird, unheard and probably dangerous part of provincial Russia) because it seemed like the easiest place to go to (certainly the easiest to get information about on the internet at that time).

The 2002 trip was a bit short (because £££…) so I didn’t get everything I’d wanted to do done. In fact I found about about more things I wanted to do while I was there; places you visited were more of a surprise when you were relying on sneaky looks at the internet at college when the teacher wasn’t looking and when you didn’t have it at home, and in the days when travel books for unusual countries couldn’t just be easily obtained from Amazon! I did however really like it; the old town is pretty and I went to an interesting island in Tallinn Bay…

I went back for a slightly longer trip in 2003, expanded the list of things I need to do about ten times, got super impressed by the really visible progress the country had made in just a year where the UK had stayed much the same, and fell completely in love.

I’d been 5 times before I visited Lithuania, and 6 times before I visited Latvia, so I’d both fallen in love with Estonia and started trying to learn the language before I had a chance to consider falling in love with another country instead!

I’ve now been more than 20 times, and pre covid I was going twice a year for a total of 4 or 5 weeks a year. The combination of knowing the country so well and knowing a bit of the language means I can just get so much more out any holiday there than I could get out a holiday in a non-Estonian speaking country. Even in such a small country there’s so much to explore. I’ve been in every county, but not every major / interesting town. A lot of the towns I have been to I’ve not explored properly. I’ve been on a few islands, but certainly not all the interesting ones, and while I’ve been to Saaremaa for two weekends I could spend another week there. I’ve been on some nature style trips, but certainly not enough.

To live in Europe is to be really lucky - it’s to have long holiday entitlements and to be close to a whole range of fascinating places by cheap and short flights. Objectively, there might be many places in Europe as nice as Estonia, and pre covid I’d take the odd weekend trip to places that weren’t Estonia, and some of them are probably places that I could have fallen in love with if they’d been the first places I’d visited. Others just made me wish I’d gone to Estonia instead! Estonia is certainly one of the best if not the best, and it was the place that stole my heart first and didn’t give it back! I see no reason to imagine that it won’t be my first choice holiday destination for the rest of my life.

(I dabbled in Finnish a bit for something to do during lockdown last year, and because online classes were a really cheap way to get contact with people. I’ve actually only been there once, for a day trip from Tallinn.)

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Right… urm… how to compare the similarity between two ranked lists? I’m pretty sure school statistics tried to teach me this, but I’ve no idea :frowning:

Looking at my A1 EKI wordlist, ranked by the frequency the words appear in in the UT one… It starts well; the top ten are almost the same and I wouldn’t regard the difference as controversial.

However the last 10% of words on the EKI A1 wordlist have an average position of about 11000 on the UT list. On a scan through I have to strongly agree with the EKI list rather than the UT list; there’s nothing on it that’s that rare. Some of the outliers are numbers below 100, basic items of clothing, commonly used greetings, and common menu items. These are definitely things proper to A1.

The last 10% of words on the EKI A2 list have an average position of about 20000 on the UT list. This includes things like some lowish ordinal numbers (whether these should appear on either list at all is a separate issue, as most of them can be formed from the cardinal numbers), some basic foodstuffs, some basic items of clothing and some health related words. Both lists may have merits, but I prefer the EKI list (being able to say you have toothache is the sort of thing that may be practical and useful…)

Looking at the B1 list, and early huge outlier is the word “Russian” - in the EKI B1 word list but at almost 30,000 on the UT one! Once there’s more words involved looking at the last 10% of words is probably unfair, but there’s also still a huge difference in the words that come in between 80 and 90% down the list.

Reversing the task, for fairness. What are some examples of the words that would fall within A1 / A2 / B1 by the UT list, but that aren’t on either A1, A2, B1 OR B2 by the EKI lists?

A1 - Things including bigger (so a word that can be formed from big if you know how), on the basis, to feel, to seem, glance, to enable, smaller, to claim, higher

A2 - election, assessment, claim, indicator, responsibility, biggest, to earn, to be found

B1 - theory, actual, user, younger, lively, following, to unite, vastly, local council

I think both lists have merit but that I prefer EKI, however what I will do is use the UT list to rank the B2 and C1 lists that I took from Sonaveeb :slight_smile:

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Hello, Barry! I’m new to Memrise and actually joined because of your wordlists. I’ve been studying from Juhan Tuldava’s book and creating flashcards with the vocabulary, but I’m wanting to switch over to more relevant vocabulary. I didn’t see a way to personalize decks made by other people to one’s own liking on here, so I was wondering if you might be willing to share your spreadsheet/s to the EKI wordlists for I or other learners to streamline the process of making personalized decks (adding sentences, partitive plurals, etc.)?

All of the resources you’ve been sharing have been absolutely incredible and beyond helpful, so thank you so much for all of your work!!

17

Hello

If you’d like to message me I use the google service and my address doesn’t have any numbers in it :slight_smile:

What I can give you would be a good start, but might be a bit user unfriendly as it’s a work in progress with lots of limitations best known to me!

18

Is there a plan to add more audio to this course?

19

Hello!

I haven’t added any audio; the audio present is where Memrise found the same word with audio in another Estonian course.

Unfortunately my Estonian wouldn’t be good enough to add audio myself, but if anyone wanted to help I’d be extremely grateful!

20

If you add me as a contributor I’m happy to add audio clips

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