I don't how to say "palatial" in Estonian, but I should learn.

I’m totally back in Tartu. For real.  I may have mentioned this in the past, but I’ve got a rather strong preference for Tartu over Tallin (though neither of them are Haapsalu..? ) so I’m pretty happy to be back.  Unfortunately, my hostel is tiny, there’s no wifi in the room, the window shade is absolutely covered with crushed, dead bugs, there’s no desk or dresser, and it’s a twenty minute walk from school, maybe ten from the center of town.  Yike.

Because we’d all like to focus on the positive, I’ll do my best.

The shower is not totally disgusting.

It’s too early to compare classes, though we spend a lot more time in the class, which I think will be good for me.  Well, it can’t be bad.  Really, my big problem is my small vocabulary,  so…  well, that’s something.  We’ll see how it goes.

Word.  I’ve been doing a pretty solid job of not actually writing anything about Estonian, which is probably a little bit odd, but I haven’t really had anything yet to say about it.  One thing I will mention is that I’ve decided they need to take another look at alphabetical order, which is as follows:

A, B, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, Š, Z, Ž, T, U, V, Õ, Ä, Ö, Ü

The problem is that all the vowels with diacritics are at the end of the alphabet.  This is something I could deal with (though I’d prefer they each just get stuck after their boring counterparts), but the problem is that they come in as Õ, Ä, Ö, Ü.  I cannot think of a good reason for Õ and Ö not being next to each other.  (Maybe I just did: Close back unrounded, open front unrounded, close-mid front rounded, close front rounded.  There’s some semblance of logic there if you stare at a vowel chart for a minute, and make roundedness the first decision but seriously, who thinks of vowel charts?  The rest of the alphabet has the unrounded vowels (a, e, i) before the rounded ones (o, u), and moves from more open to more closed…  but like I said, who thinks of vowel charts?)

I also don’t see why you’d bother with diacritics for vowels when there’s still a Y available, especially when Finnish uses the Y, but I guess that puts them in line with other European languages.  Still,  it’s certainly an improvement over the way it works in English with our blahblahblah, and sometimes Y (and W?) but what’s not an improvement over English?  I actually do kinda like how Š, Z, Ž follow S, though these don’t really pop up that much in Estonian.  It’d be great the Latin alphabet were in some sort of oral cavity-based order, but now I’m going crazy.

(In the spirit of totally going crazy, here’s my proposed new alphabetical order:

 A, B, P,  Ä,  D, T,  E, G, K, H, I, F, V,  Õ,  S, Š, Z, Ž, O, M, Ö,  N, U, L, R, Ü, J

Similar looking vowels are togetherish but spread evenly-ish between the consonants, roundedness/unroundedness is reflected, voiced/voiceless letters are paired up, stops come first, the approximant is near at the end like ‘Merican Y, F is next to V and the other non-Estonian letters are near S.  Ha, okay, so maybe this was a ridiculous waste of time.  So it goes.)

I’m going to do homework now, then figure out where i’m going to get dinner.