“Why do people learn the Estonian language?”
I’m not exaggerating if I say that it is the most frequent question I’ve gotten in my life so far. The most frequent and one of the first when meeting a new person. I introduce myself “Hello! I’m Paulina, from Russia and I am an Estonian language teacher”, and they almost always say, “Wow! But… wait, who are you teaching?”
Okay, to begin with, let me introduce myself better. I am a second-year PhD student at Tartu University, studying Finno-Ugric languages. But before moving to Estonia, I had been working as an Estonian language teacher in St. Petersburg, my home city and the second biggest city in Russia, for more than ten years now. Did you know that the population of St. Petersburg is three times more than in Estonia? It is a huge centre of attraction for people all around the country and the world. Generally if not born here, people come and stay there seeking for the best options for their living. Why would people from St. Petersburg be interested in learning Estonian, a language which is spoken only in one little European country?
Usually they say that people learn Estonian because they want to move to this country. It is the most popular answer, I hear it nearly every time. If you want to live, work or study in Estonia, you have to learn the main language of the country. It sounds reasonable, but in fact, it is not necessarily true. Of course, learning Estonian gives you more options and opportunities, but the language is really difficult and often it is an optional condition for settling in the country. There are lots of people who have lived in Estonia for years but keep using English or even Russian. So, it’s not a big deal. You will not die, you will survive.
Anyway, I acknowledge that some of my students do move to Estonia later. But that’s only a third of all my students and the other two thirds of them never do it. So why do these students want to learn Estonian then? Let’s look at the stories of some of these people.
“I want to know an unusual language”
I am from Russia and I am used to teaching Russians. But once I came to meet a new group and found a person there who was from New Zealand. He was an English-speaking person who preferred to live in a gloomy northern megapolis rather than in tropical landscapes. He had lived in Russia for over 20 years and was fluent in Russian. However, he did not stop there. Before starting to learn Estonian, he learned Chinese. Estonian was next on the list of unusual languages, and indeed it is quite different from all the previous ones. After a year of learning he came back to me and told me that he wrote a song in Estonian. So apart from learning languages he also wrote music and played it with his band. Thus Estonian has found its little place even in the musical side of his life!
“I want to know the language of a country I visit every weekend”
A man from St. Petersburg bought a summer house in the Eastern part of Estonia. He bought it to have a place to rest with his wife. It was not very big, and it was in a little village by the Baltic sea. Being an engineer and having an inventive mind he decided to grow grapes on his site. Well, he succeeded in it. I know about it because soon after buying a dwelling he came to me willing to learn Estonian. To be honest, Estonian is quite difficult to learn and for people who are older than 50 it is twice as difficult. Seniors learn foreign languages slowly, because the memory is already not very good at this age. But the intellect is still intact. I saw how difficult it was for this guy to remember the words. But at the same time, it was he who asked me the trickiest questions about Estonian grammar.
“I want to take a break in the middle of the working day”
Some people say that they don’t have time to learn a language. To counter that, I now have an example of a person who was a very, very busy man. He was a lawyer and he spent most of his working time at court hearings. 10 minutes before the lesson he would be on the phone attending his business. When the lesson began, he would turn off his telephone and start studying. When the lesson ended, he would turn on the telephone and then continue with his business. Perfect time-management! He had no other reason to learn Estonian other than just to know the language of a country where he takes a vacation with family. Okay, maybe there was one more — he once told me that our lessons were a kind of a break for him from his main job.
“I just want to learn Estonian, why not?”
Someone would say that St. Petersburg is a city which is located close to Estonia, so obviously there are people who know about Estonia and are motivated more to learn a language of a neighboring country, but online-learning opportunities have shown that people, who want to learn Estonian can be found in the places which are quite far away from the Baltic region. For example, I have taught a Russian girl who lives in Southern France, a girl from Belarus, a girl from Kurgan, a Russian city near the Ural mountains. Today I have online classes with a Russian girl, who lives in a little village in Central Russia. It is a remote place without any kind of night life or entertainment, but due to this fact one can have more time for doing some extraordinary things such as learning Estonian. All above mentioned people have their own personal interest towards Estonian, though they don’t want to move to Estonia.
“I have no idea why I learn Estonian, but let’s try and see”
Well, we have to admit — there are many more fans of Estonia around the world than I expected. But the most interesting category of people are those who started to learn Estonian without any previous motivation. They think “Why not?” and throw themselves into a stream. A dentist moved to St. Petersburg from Chelyabinsk — a huge industrial city in Central Russia. He has never been to Estonia, unlike the rest of the people in the group, who have already visited every corner there. However he studied a lot and even went on to clear the B1-level proficiency test for Estonian (it is a test that you can take in Estonia). Today his language skills are good enough for him to understand Estonian media. He told me that he starts his morning by listening to Estonian radio stations which calms him and makes him be more patient with his clients and colleagues.
The basic thing that I learned from my students is that learning a language doesn’t need any serious purpose. Of course, having one helps, but surprisingly the most active, the most curious and the most interested students I met were among those who didn’t really need to learn the language. The best students never had a big purpose, but they all had a great motivation. A motivation is a notion which is really difficult to define, it is as hard to know where to take it from. But the truth is that the sources of motivation could be unexpected and non-obvious. If you can find some energy for something special and unusual, sometimes it’s enough. Taking a break from the routine, finding a community that shares a similar interest, listening to nice music or maybe just having fun? What is your excuse to not engage in learning?
All pictures belong to the author.
The cover picture is from baltnews.ee.
