Do not let this introduction scare you! Every language has some extremely simple features and some really difficult ones and the complexity tends to level out. Japanese and Chinese must be learned twice - once to speak, once to write. While studying German, you have to memorize the gender for thousands of words, in English the pronunciation is hard to grasp.
Although the Finno-Ugric languages developed separately for thousands of years, they share many common lexical and grammatical features to prove a common origin. These include:
Cases: Nouns, adjectives, numerals and pronouns can take fourteen different cases. This is more than in Latin, Russian, German or English, less than in Finnish or Hungarian. The same meanings which in Estonian are expressed by different case endings, are expressed by prepositions in English and many other languages. In Estonian, 6 cases of these 10 can be modelled using postpositions, but one normally uses the shorter way, i.e. case endings. Roots of words tend to change in declination and conjugation. In order to be able to form all forms of the wierdest words correctly, one must simply know 2-7 of its basic forms (depending on the category of the word: noun, adjective, verb, etc.; nouns are the worst), or to be a native Estonian. The wierdest words are the ones that you need most.
Conjugation of verbs: There are only four tenses: one present and three pasts. NO future, Estonians do not believe in the future. In each of the tenses, the ending of a verb depends on the person and the number. Very awkwardly, each verb has two infinitives, and you have to know when to use which. Even funnier, both infinitives can be declined.
Word derivation: Estonians are fond of inventing new words. The easiest way of doing this is putting words together. Alternatively, or as a supplement, word formation suffixes can be used. Seeing an Estonian text, a foreigner may first think that Estonian is very information-sparse. In fact, it is not. If you translate an Estonian text into English, the English version will be no shorter than the Estonian one. The thing is that the long words in the Estonian text are compound, put together of 2-4 words and word formation suffixes.
NO gender, NO articles, RARE prepositions: What gender? Unlike Indo-European languages there is no grammatical gender whatsoever in Estonian. The only cases vaguely resembling gender are word formation suffixes like - for male, -tar or -nna for female. Tantsijatar is necessarily a female dancer, lauljanna a female singer, but you cannot tell if tantsija or laulja is a male or a female performer. This is a relief for an Indo-European who is freed from the obsession of using pronouns in a politically correct way. Articles and prepositions are also completely missing, so mets, klaver and vesi are forest, piano and water, not a forest, the piano or - water. Postpositions are used, though, sometimes as an alternative to some case. Klaveri sisse is grammatically equal to klaverisse, both meaning into the piano. It may seem odd that instead of saying under the piano, Estonians say klaveri all - the piano under.
Free word order: The same question nearly applies here: What
order? Using morphological means to express relations between words in
a sentence considerably frees the order the words must appear. It is true
that some orders feel more natural for a sentence, and Subject-Verb-Object
is predominant in neutral everyday sentences but a sentence is perfectly
understandable even if the word order is absolutely wrong. If grammatical
relations are signalled by suffixes, the position of words in the sentence
is not important, but if there are no case endings available, the only
means of indicating these relations is word order. This is why English
has a rigid word order, but Estonian a free one. The canonical example
used by teachers is a sentence, consisting of four words tihti often
taevas in the sky tähti
stars nähti were seen,
where all combinations are equally possible and there are several candidates
for the 'most comfortable' word order.
Tihti taevas tähti nähti
Tihti taevas nähti tähti
Tihti tähti taevas nähti
Tihti tähti nähti taevas
Tihti nähti taevas tähti
Tihti nähti tähti taevas
Nähti tihti taevas tähti
Nähti tihti tähti taevas
Nähti taevas tähti tihti
Nähti taevas tihti tähti
Nähti tähti taevas tihti
etc, etc
Two sources were used to draw material for this compilation:
Estonian
Language FAQ and
Estonian
Language fact sheet by the Estonian Institute.