#estonian summer

[katverse]

Chasing Waterfalls 🌊

[halljavalge]

Source: alisheinleht

ℍ𝐚𝓵ｌ נ𝐀 𝔳คĻǤẸ

[mikfelt]

[pvffinsdaisies]

Hetalia au where everything is the same except australia is in the background of any and all summer events that happen in Europe

[alackofghosts]

i bring a sort of pokemon trainer energy to this grocery store

[tasakesi]

I MISS MY FRIEND WHY IS SHE IN TAIWAN 😭😭😭

[etruski]

Had a swim in the sea today and the local Greeks looked at me like I was crazy

[leeenuu]

SUVI!!! 😭🫶🏻😭🫶🏻

[estonian-is-horrible]

[ultraestonianblog]

[httpiastri]

paul summer break headcanons 🇮🇹☀️🍕

– of course, summer vacation with paul in italy equals sitting on the back of his vespa whenever you go anywhere. the beach? vespa. dinner restaurant? vespa. just wanna go for a ride and see the sights and the sunset over the sea? vespa!!

– i picture him being so excited to take you on it the first time. just grinning so so brightly when handing you the helmet, giving your hair a good ruffle, barely able to contain his excitement over getting to have you there with him.

– and him giggling when you say "please don't go too fast?" because you know he has a certain attraction to speed... and him just going "you do know this thing barely even goes above 50 kilometers per hour, right?"

– he adores the feeling of your arms around his waist, holding on for dear life because you think you're gonna fly off otherwise... he loves your little squeals when he drives over a bump, the way your hands clench around his shirt when he speeds up…

– "this view is great, isn't it?" "…." "you're looking, right? your eyes aren't closed again, are they?" "……." "y/n. open your eyes." "i can't, i'm going to die!!"

– but once you get used to it, you'll be enjoying it just as much as he is. feeling his back muscles flex against your chest, chatting a little whenever he stops for a red light, and just watching him look so crazy attractive when driving…

– oh and him reaching down to intertwine his fingers with yours when you've got your arms wrapped around his waist… giving your hand a gentle squeeze, maybe even lifting it up to his helmet as if kissing the back of your hand… <3

– swimming with paul is another must!

– doesn't matter if you don't personally like swimming, because he will be forcing you in with him. or tricking you.

– "come on, just get your feet wet! you'll see how warm it is" and then he just picks you up and throws you in… especially at the beach

– i assume you're a bit less reluctant to go into the pool at the house because it's warmer, and oh how he loves playing around with you in the pool

– throwing balls, competing against each other in different swim styles, or water wrestling with his friends (yk the one when you're sitting on his shoulders).... his smile will be so big and sweet all day, and his giggles will be like music to your ears.

– (and then, hours later when you're getting ready to sleep, he'll kiss your forehead and thank you for playing around with him...)

– you'll need to take responsibility for him and make sure he takes proper care of his skin, though. that light estonian skin can't take too much sun without proper sunscreen... and since he has so many muscles and he's so broad, it's hard for him to reach every inch of his skin with the sunscreen... so you will definitely need to help him out!

– paul definitely enjoys some nighttime swimming, too. either just jumping in quickly in the pool (maybe featuring a quick makeout session with you pushed up against the pool wall), or some skinny dipping in the sea...

– italy has so much lovely cuisine to be tested, and thanks to paul's restrictions and diets being less strict during his break, the two of you love exploring it all together.

– so many cozy dinner dates at little trattorias... lunches by the sea... drinks on rooftop bars...

– a lot of the time, you'll be out with his friends, too, but you bet paul isn't leaving your side for even a second.

– always with his fingers intertwined with yours under the table, or an arm draped around the back of your chair. always asking how you like your food and if you want him to order something new for you.

– but there will also be so many moments just with the two of you, holding hands on top of the table this time, with gentle smiles, more private topics and discussion of the future...

[unofficial-estonia]

In the late summer and autumn of 1944, 75,000 to 80,000 people fled Estonia (across all Baltics – 300,000 people) from the invading Red Army at the turning point of WWII. These events are known today as the Great Escape.

The Great Escape has also been called the Boat Escape, as many crossed the stormy seas to Sweden and Finland in small boats. Many of those who attempted to escape perished at Sea because of the deliberate bombing of the Soviet army.

People mainly escaped across the sea from the coastal areas of Estonia, first to Finland and Sweden, and later to Germany. Many who had fled to Finland had to leave for Sweden because they faced possible extradition to Soviet power.

An estimated 7,000 to 9,000 Estonians fled to Finland, from where – fearing deportation to Estonia occupied by the Red Army – they moved on to neutral Sweden.

Between 27,000 and 29,000 Estonians arrived in Sweden, mainly from Western Estonia and the islands. Over 600 ships and boats arrived there from Estonia.

According to various sources, 42,000 to 45,000 Estonians evacuated to Germany, but they also went along the coast or along the railway through Latvia and Lithuania.

The collected stories of war refugees show that many were hoping to return home soon. Most people thought that the situation was temporary and Western allies would not leave the Baltic countries to the Soviet Union.

[halljavalge]

Source: korilasekook

ℍ𝐚𝓵ｌ נ𝐀 𝔳คĻǤẸ

[mikfelt]

[osmanthusoolong]

“Lia Hess, chair of the board of the Estonian Summer Camp Society, said in an emailed statement to CBC News that the monument was installed by Estonian war veterans who came to Canada as refugees in the 1940s and 1950s.

"The Estonian and Jewish communities share a common hatred and disgust of all totalitarian and oppressive regimes," Hess said in her statement.

"The Estonian summer camp does not now and has never honoured Nazi collaborators and our children have never been indoctrinated into worshipping Nazi leaders as alleged."

She added that the campers also commemorate Black Ribbon Day, which is formally recognized by the European Union and Canada as a day of remembrance for victims of Stalinism and Nazism.

"Flowers were placed in remembrance at the base of this plaque, like one who grieves at a grave. We are remembering those that died and the importance of defending our independent country, language, traditions and customs," Hess's statement says.”

So definitely not indoctrination of children into worshipping Nazi leaders, just placing flowers at their monuments and teaching them about how great they and their beliefs were. Totally a different thing.

“Eva Plach, an associate professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University, said that when the Swords Monument was erected decades ago, Estonia was still a part of the Soviet Union and its people were fighting for independence.

"What always needs to be remembered in this region is that kind of active military resistance to the Soviet Union often meant collaboration with Nazi Germany," Plach said, explaining how Rebane and Riipalu could have once been celebrated within the Estonian community while also being a part of the Nazi military.”

I wonder if there’s a word for someone who allies themselves with Nazis and works alongside them to further their goals.

“”After the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was formally dissolved as a sovereign state, Estonia, the Baltic States and other countries "were trying to rewrite or understand better" their Second World War histories, Plach said.

"They were looking for nationalist heroes. They were looking for feel-good nationalist stories, where it was really difficult to find those stories and it was complicated, too."”

That actually doesn’t seem very complicated at all. It in fact seems pretty straightforward that you’re not gonna look like anything but Nazis if you venerate your Nazi heritage.

Canada is full of shit like this. SS memorials in public cemeteries, summer camps where little kids can learn about their proud history as Nazi collaborators.

@allthecanadianpolitics

[allthingslinguistic]

Summer 2024 travel plans and Language Guinea Pig Diaries

In August and September, I'm doing a bunch of travel to various European countries. In order, they are:

Glasgow, Scotland for World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon), where I'll be on a panel about Languages as World-Building and doing assorted meetups

Helsinki, Finland for the Societas Linguistica Europea annual meeting

Tartu, Estonia for a colloquium talk on Applying Linguistic Methods to Linguistic Communication at the University of Tartu and a two-part workshop on lingcomm for participants of Methodological Excellence in Data-Driven Approaches to Linguistics (MEDAL)

Nijmegen, Netherlands for some meetings with linguists

Florence, Italy to visit friends

Madrid, Spain for the publication of the Spanish translation of Because Internet by Pie de Página

I hope to run into lots of interesting people at these events! If you're already in one of these places and I know you, including from the interent, feel free to reach out and see if we can fit something in!

This whirlwind list of events and places has also gotten me thinking: this trip is going to be a fun chance to learn some more about some languages! I'm already fairly familiar with Spanish and Scottish English (I doubt people will speak much Broad Scots to me with my Canadian accent), and I'm confident on my ability to brush up on them by a bit of exposure and possibly watching a relevant movie on the way there, but the other four languages are going to take a bit more doing. Here's my initial situation, in order of familiarity:

Italian - I studied it for two years in undergrad and spent about a week in Italy shortly thereafter, and by the end of the week I was finally beginning to feel like it was starting to "click" but then I haven't really touched it since then. So I feel like it would come back with exposure but I wonder if there's something I could do in advance to help it come back sooner/faster rather than taking the whole week of being there again

Dutch - I went through the whole Duolingo tree on rapid-speed back when you could skip through lessons for new material only and not practice drills over about a year in 2019-ish just for fun and as an excuse to look up lots of Germanic roots (I studied German before I knew any linguistics so it was fun to triangulate there). Never actually been anywhere Dutch was being spoken but I did find I could get the gist of youtube videos about linguistics in Dutch so it probably needs "activation" similar to Italian

Finnish - No background except for a few linguistics factoids (case! vowel harmony!), and that it's a Uralic language (related to Hungarian but not to any of the Indo-European languages, so this is a fun chance to learn some things about a language family that's unfamiliar to me)

Estonian - Also no background, also Uralic, clearly the fun thing to do would be to learn enough bits of Estonian and Finnish that I could compare them with each other (also since I'm meeting with linguists in both countries, this would be a fun topic for small talk conversation)

At the same time, there are a lot of language learning strategies floating around out there, and I have two nearly matched pairs of languages on this list: Italian and Dutch, both of which I am pretty good at cognate languages for and have studied some a while back, so I could test two activation strategies, and Finnish and Estonian, both of which I have essentially zero familiarity with, so I could test two strategies for getting somewhere near a basic functional ability.

I have about a month until I start this cycle with a flight to Helsinki. One month, four languages. What could possibly go wrong?

Here's my tentative plan so far:

Activation, Italian and Dutch - I'm pretty sure what I need for these languages is largely as much audio imput as possible (given what's feasible around like, all the other things going on in my life). I've decided to aim to watch one or two youtube videos in Italian per day, focusing on relatively concrete, daily life topics (such as gelato making) and to listen to one episode of a podcast in Dutch per day, aiming to get through the back catalogue of Kletsheads, a podcast about multilingual children.

Why these strategies? Well, I'm meeting up with linguists in the Netherlands but not in Italy, so it makes sense to try to learn more linguistics vocab there. Also, I'm curious about the effect of medium between video and podcast: will being able to see people talking and what they're talking about have much of an effect on how much I can understand? Will I find it easier to integrate one or the other of watching videos vs listening to podcasts into my life at a practical level? Plus, will concentrating on a single, more academic topic vs watching a scattered, unsystematic list of videos have effects on my vocabulary?

Basic function, Finnish and Estonian - I'm probably looking for some phrases to say to people in shops and restaurants and the ability to pronounce things written on menus adequately and match heard words/placenames to written versions on signs. I started doing a very minimal one lesson a day on Duolingo for Finnish in January, when planning for this trip started, for the very simple reason that I was already familiar with Duolingo and it doesn't have Estonian, so I decided to just start by doing a thing I was familiar with until I got around to doing more research. I've been casting around trying to figure out a source of basic Estonian phrases online when a friend mentioned learning French on tiktok, so I searched for "learn estonian" and voila! I think I'll also aim for a video or two of Estonian phrases per day but I want to do more rewatching than with Italian or Dutch, since I'm aiming to remember specific common phrases. So maybe one rewatched video and one new video, per day? They're shorter on tiktok than on youtube.

Why these strategies? This is a comparison of Duolingo's more systematic approach with lots of repetition and gamification and word-by-word translation in a relatively sterile environment versus a more organic and free-styling approach with more grounding in real people and faces and full phrases where I'm not really trying to understand the individual words. There are lots of factors to compare and it's not a completely fair comparison since I started Duolingo in January and I only thought to start the TikTok idea this week, but hey, learning anything still counts as progress.

Summary: I have four languages, each focused on a different app: YouTube, my podcast app, Duolingo, and TikTok. Hopefully for the video apps, this will help their algorithms kick in and start recommending me further useful videos. The difference between the two video strategies is that for Italian, I'm watching monolingual videos that are aimed at people who already speak Italian and just want to learn something about the topic, whereas for Estonian, I'm watching bilingual videos aimed at English speakers who want to learn some words or phrases in Estonian.

Am I going to get these four languages mixed up? Probably! I'm hoping that choosing a different app/strategy for each is a little bit helpful on that front.

Do I think these strategies are optimal? Probably not! But I'm aiming to choose things that feel relatively clear to implement consistently, rather than getting bogged down in researching language learning methods instead of actually getting exposure to the languages. I'll probably do a basic "look up some key phrases and try to learn them" a day or two before entering each place too. And maybe shift other aspects depending on how things are going, stay tuned!

At any rate, I figured it would be more fun to blog about my attempts to use myself as a guinea pig for a few different language learning strategies here than to just do it in my own head (and hopefully help me with staying motivated). And maybe people will have tips of either language learning strategies that have worked for you in general or specific ideas for these particular languages, so this is the beginning of a series that I'm calling #Language Guinea Pig Diaries and future posts will also be posted under that tag!