Eric Seufert, for ERR NewsOne good reason to learn the Estonian language: to prove you’re not a Creep.
The only language I had formally studied before Estonian was Spanish. My high school required every student to study a foreign language for two years, but we were only offered Spanish and Latin. I chose Spanish. If learning another language seemed pointless to me at the time, learning a dead language seemed doubly so.
Learning Spanish was fun. My teacher – a recent college graduate who spent a semester abroad in Barcelona and therefore considered herself an expert on Dali – spent the majority of our lessons complaining that she couldn’t meet any decent men. If dating as a twenty-something high school teacher in suburban Houston was difficult in 1999, studying a foreign language was impossibly easy. I showed up to class, listened to my teacher drone on about some jerk that just didn’t understand her, and aced quizzes on the Spanish words for household objects. Unfortunately, my second year of Spanish education was less colorful. My teacher was from Spain; she was also in her mid-50s and seemingly didn’t date much. I interpreted her passion for actually teaching us the language as contempt.
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