How to pronunce

Indo-European languages often tend to write 'hello' and pronunce 'good bye'. In contrast, Estonian is a 'phonetic' language with no special rules for spelling. Every letter used in writing corresponds to one phoneme.

Native speakers have a keen ear to recognise foreigners from their pronunciation. If your background is a language with complex spelling rules then learning Estonian phonology mostly consists of getting rid of those rules.

Stress in Estonian falls on the first syllable of the word. Every phoneme is pronounced distinctly (unlike English, where many unstressed vowels become schwa and the ends of words are often swallowed).

Consonants

The following are pronounced and written as in English:
c, f, h, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, x, z

The following consonants require special attention:

g, b, d are are unvoiced and sound like weak k, p, t
s^ is pronounced like the sh in 'ship'
z^ is pronounced like the g in 'regime'
j sounds like y in 'yes'

As you already know, the letters c, q, w, x, y are not native Estonian and appear only in foreign words or in some family names.

Double consonants are pronounced long, like the final and initial /k/ sound in 'book-case'. When a double consonant occurs at the end of a word, try to linger on the sound slightly.

Vowels

a this is a, not 'ei' or 'ae' or anything else. Pronunce like 'a' in 'farm'
e the sound in 'set' and 'bed'
i in between short 'i' in 'sit' and ea in 'please'
o like the sound in 'boss'
u 'u' in 'put' and oo in 'boot'
õ difficult sound for Russians and Finns; like the first part of the diphtong in 'most' or 'road'. Do not confuse this with Portuguese - the only other European language using o with tilde. Unlike Portuguese, in Estonian tilde has nothing to do with nasalization.
ä as in German ä, like 'a' in 'matter' or 'cat'
ö as in German ö, say French 'peu' and 'le'
ü as in German ü and French u as in 'début'

Length

Estonian, like Finnish uses length as a distinctive feature, i.e. you can find pairs of words where the longitude is the only difference between separate meanings. Estonian has three different degrees of longitude. This means that all vowels and most of the consonants can appear short (written with one letter), long or in the third degree (written with two letters). Consider
kade 'envious' -- kate 'cover', noun in nominative -- katte 'cover', noun in genitive
vala 'pour', verb in imperative -- vaala 'whale', genitive -- vaala 'whale', partitive

The first degree of longitude is always pronunced shorter than the other two. It is much more difficult to tell apart the second and the third degree as their difference also lies in different stress and intonation.

Palatalization

Palatalization is another distinctive feature of Estonian words. This means that l, n, s or t may sound soft even if there is no following 'i' or 'j'. Consider
kann 'mug' -- kan'n' 'toy',
kott 'wooden shoe' -- kot't' 'bag'
nutt 'crying' -- nut't' 'bud'

If you have sound card and RealAudio installed, you can listen to lots of radio stations speaking Estonian. Try e.g. Raadio Kuku live programme. Some of the talk shows are available separately from http://www.zzz.ee/foorum/raadio/.