F IS FOR FINNO-UGRIC
Ten words, we said.
Learn ten words of Estonian before we arrived, so that at least we could be polite to our hosts. Say thank you, please, hello. Just ten.
I managed one.
Aitäh. Thanks.
Even then, my pronunciation was approximate and, as I discovered later, "thanks" is commonly used in conversation anyway.
There are few hooks in Estonian for your average English speaker to hang their learning on, even if you've learned how to get by in a range of languages, as I have: conversational Spanish, shopkeeper French, bartender German, simit-seller Turkish.
Estonian is related to exactly none of these.
It belongs to the Finno-Ugric family of languages, which is distinct from the Indo-European family, which includes English and most other European languages. As the name suggests, Finno-Ugric includes Finnish, also Hungarian, plus a swathe of languages and dialects from the Baltic to the Urals.
Apart from "thanks", there seem to be very few loan words from English or any of the Romance languages
of western Europe, so you can forget coasting through the arrivals
lounge with your high school French.
If you're on the tourist trail around Tallinn's chuches, you might start to recognise words with a common root, such as altar (altar), ingel (angel) or kirik (kirk or church). Piiskop is bishop and once you get your eye in with the double vowels you might start to work a few more words out the longer you stay and the more attention you pay.
Then, by the time you leave, you might even be able to say to your hosts, a sincere aitäh! And a hearty hüvasti!