[mdmoll]

A wonderful introduction to the Estonian language and some of its quirks. I have minor quibbles, although my relationship to the language is as a non-native historian of the country, not a Finno-Ugric linguist or local. I always felt (rather unscientifically, of course) as though Estonian traded some of the agglutinative regularity that characterize Finnish and Hungarian for greater vocabulary familiarity for Germanic speakers. Despite what the author writes in her first endnote on foreign loan words, I've found a knowledge of German to be quite helpful when trying to guess the meaning of a word (or to extemporaneously construct one) using a calque from German.

[Mediterraneo10]

> I've found a knowledge of German to be quite helpful when trying to guess the meaning of a word (or to extemporaneously construct one) using a calque from German.

The same can be said of Hungarian. In spite of Hungarian being a Uralic language and utterly opaque to the neighbouring countries, so many of the verbal derivations (especially since the 19th-century language reform) are calques from German. I found it easier to memorize certain Hungarian verbal idioms by storing them mentally alongside their German models.