Shelley has signed up to take Estonian lessons, starting next week, that are offered free by the University for visiting academics and their families. In the meantime we are gradually working more things out about the language using a mixture of guesswork (usually not very successful: for example orange is "apelsin"), a small dictionary helpfully lent to us by a colleague, and some more unconventional sources ... .
For example, I attended a choral concert last week in the recently renovated St. John's Church in the centre of town -- one of several red brick churches in Tartu. The second half of the concert was a Requiem by the early 20th century composer Cyrillus Kreek, and most of the text was in Estonian. Listening to the choir while reading the Estonian words in front of me was very helpful in getting a sense of how to pronounce the various vowel sounds distinctive to Estonian -- particular since so much of singing is just vowel sounds! We have a key to pronunciation in the back of our guidebook to Estonia, but it is almost impossible to work out the actual sounds from the descriptions. For example
"õ is pronounced with the lips in the position of a short e while the tongue is retracted."
"ü is produced by pronouncing i with a protrusion of the lips and a narrow opening of the mouth." [This ü is an important vowel, since it is the first letter of the Estonian word for "university"! [see above pictures]
Another source of information, not for pronunciation but for vocabulary, have been the 'word-picture' books I found in the children's section of the public library. Seeing the words next to pictures of the appropriate objects is helpful, although I'm not sure how much use I will have for 'zebra,' 'giraffe', and so on. There seems to be almost no overlap between Estonian children's books and those from the English speaking world. I had expected to see various familar titles in translation, but the only series I did see in the library was "Winnie Puhh" (and his friend "Tiiger").
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