I’m curious will you look to add dictionaries for any specific language? I see you’re a native speaker of Yiddisch and I must say I find that language beautiful. If you ever get the chance to add it to lingQ please do! It’s a minority language here in Sweden and most of Europe so it would be awesome to create another source of learning materials for those who have it in their family.
I might do something with Yiddish one of these days. There are others on my list, though.
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If you hesitate I must say that it really doesn’t take that long. The translating of the text can be done in maybe two weeks, three weeks tops. And the recording you can do over a weekend.
The grammar guide is also very easy if you’re grammatically inclined. But of course I understand that you don’t have so much time to it. I’m just very eager to see it on here
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Hi!
A collection of reliable Estonian dictionaries for different purposes can be found here: Sõnastikud – EKI.ee – Eesti Keele Instituut
As an Estonian I can say that we sometimes use Google Translate to amuse ourselves by letting it translate an Estonian text into English and laughing at the result. Google Translate and DeepL can be used to get a very rough base for a translation but both need heavy editing by someone who actually speaks the language. This applies in both directions. These systems only understand the most literal sense of a word and phrase but very often that is not what was meant. And sometimes they just hallucinate and make up things that were not in the original text at all.
Estonian television shows, series, etc can be viewed here: https://jupiter.err.ee/. I`m not sure how much is available outside Estonia, though.
Best wishes with getting the Estonian course up!
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If you are really interested in learning Estonian, there is a very interesting English-language Estonian Studies program.
Wonder if people involved with the program might be interested in helping develop Lingq?
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Hello, I am also waiting for years, that I could use LingQ for learning Estonian. I have lots of manuals and childrens books, so I really don’t understand why I should wait for ministories and a Grammar Guide. I only want to import my own material and learn. Nowadays it is easy to produce even good audio files with Eleven labs or podcasts with Notebook LM. In my experience, Gemini is better in making transcriptions than LingQ itself. Well, that has been discussed a lot, I only wanted to show my interest and support.
For all Estonian learners I have here two wonderful tools: Eesti keele süntesaator and Eesti keele morfanalysaator. They are usefull if you want to form or to analyse the Estonian forms of verbs or nouns which are not always easy to recognize.
I already posted them some months ago. But my post was deleted immediately (because “I typed too fast”) and I was excluded from the forum. Several mails to the support didn’t help, so I try it here again under another accout. The meaning of my name is the same, only in Estonian - as a statement of support for the Estonian language.
I hope it works this time. Kõike head!
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Hello, Giraffe 28, that is a very good idea. In the same way, I can recommend Tartu University. In 2013 I spent there two weeks at the Summer language course. It was a great experience: the language lessons of course, but also the program of excursions, cinema and so on. Instead of a hotel I decided to live with a family. You can’t get better contact to the country and it’s culture. This year’s summer course is open for registration until the end of April. Here is the link: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://ut.ee/en/estonian-language-summer-courses&ved=2ahUKEwizr_bKsamTAxWFhv0HHaDCAY8QFnoECBoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw05z6OeMa6mrHiigUMosrIq
And the teachers were very dedicated. Perhaps they would be interested in helping to develop Estonian on LingQ.
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Did you ever get a reply from anyone of Estonian will soon be available?
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No, never. It’s really frustrating.
No, I did not. It’s still possible we just need someone motivated enough to grab the right people.
You need a person willing to translate the mini stories into Estonian WITH a GOOD audio recording of each file. Then you need someone to write a grammar guide.
Anyone can do this, and I think if you’ve been interested for this long maybe you should ask a friend, relative or acquiantance if they can help you or maybe even if they’d do it for like 100$. Once we’ve got it on LingQ that’s the hard part over.
Hello, I have 3 questions concerning your post:
- Assuming I were to find someone who would be able and willing to write a grammar guide and to translate/ record the mini stories - whom should the person contact? Is there an external email address? I cannot expect that the person would pay a subscription to LingQ only in order to help us.
- I remember that I read in the history of this post that there were at least two persons who already had dedicated a lot of energy in the grammar guide or the stories independently of each other. What became of their work?
- I looked for a Finnish grammar guide in order to show an example. Nothing. Then I tried Hungarian. The two languages which are closest to Estonian. Nothing. How is it possible that these two languages don’t have any Grammar guide and for Estonian language it is a basic requirement? By the way, even in languages where it exists, I could not find it from the platform itself. Only after asking Google I found the German and English version. If the guide is so important, why is it nowhere in the menu?
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Hello, thank you for your questions I’ll address one piece at a time. For this there’s already a dedicated link. It is usually someone different at lingQ each time they’re a small team. New Languages on LingQ
Nothing. That’s the simple answer. You can have an unfinished product that’s 80% of the way to completion, but if you don’t get it over the finish line then that’s that. I don’t know what went wrong.
I don’t like the grammar guide either, but it’s a relatively new addition to lingQ. lingQ sets the terms for how they want their business to operate, and while I don’t personally agree with the requirement, it’s a choice they made in time. lingQ is a very small business mostly developed as a passion project, with time they expand in ambition and scope. The reason lingQ raised the requirements is because a lot of past projects ended up with mixed results. The mini stories for Romanian used the wrong symbols for a while the ‘ã’ which isn’t Romanian at all. The Finnish mini stories also only reach number 14. It makes sense for lingQ as their languages become progressively niche to expect more in terms of quality. lingQ mainly loses money on smaller languages, the ones they earn money from are the languages that exist on every platform, the east asian three, the larger romance languages, Russian and German. Estonian is a very small language. I’ve seen people espouse interest in this language for a while now. I’ve been personally interested for a long time and I’ve shared a lot of my efforts on here so somebody could pick up the torch. Instead people are just wishing something happened.
I don’t want to be pessimistic, I hope you do decide to try and get Estonian on lingQ, but it makes sense for lingQ to want to expect more quality as their business keeps growing. Realistically if a person who knew Estonian really tried it would take a week of dedicated work. Not more than a month. From my personal endeavors no one has been interested. There are many free to use grammar explanations which can be used to inspire a grammar guide on lingQ. There is a lot of ready made work on Estonian as well. If someone’s dedicated enough it won’t take long.
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Thank you so much for your detailed answers. I’ll try my very best to contact my former teachers at Tartu University. At least for the mini stories it won’t work without native speakers. What about the Grammar guide - if there is no fixed form/content - maybe they have something ready for their students. Or they could make it as a project for learners. Let’s see …
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Sorry for my late response, I’m struggling with my bachelor thesis. Lovely to hear that you went to Tartü I’ve been considering it for a master’s in Cyber Security.
There’s no clear format for how a grammar guide should look, this makes it both easier and harder. Easier in the sense that you’ll probably get away with more stuff, harder in that you have to guess.
This you can do all on your own, what you’re supposed to include are the grammar points that are imperative for understanding Estonian. Here I would obviously put the cases and explain all of them, honestly copying wikipedia could be enough. I would add cases, pronouns, with a slight focus on the formal second-person pronoun teie ja te.
I’d also add numbers and the alphabet. Questions, verbs, adverbs, nouns, plural, and negation. Just short example sentences is all. I would really borrow from the Korean grammar guide conceptually because it is the most straight forward one. Estonian isn’t that grammatically different besides its agglutinate features. I would focus on the cases that are extra hard, other than that you’re good. I would add if I had the time and energy a phonetic table to compare sounds in Estonian, especially one explaining short and long vowels.
It could be enough to write “Estonian contains long and short vowels and consonants, these are necessary to learn as confusing them could completely alter the meaning of a word.” Nothing more than that honestly, except some examples.
I really hope you succeed my friend.