broaden your world

I just remembered how I once happend to visit a third biggest town of Estonia - Narva, situated in eastern part, next to Russian boarder. Anyway...I entered one shop and asked for a pack of gum in Estonian language. To my big surprise the salesperson didn`t understand a word of it and asked me to repeat it in Russian...

Estonians who have been to some Lasnamäe`s (city district of Tallinn) little basement stores, visited some wierd looking bar in Kopli (also a part of the town) or visited Narva...they know that you can`t deal there with Estonian language. It`s an everlasting problem of our country.
I´m not blaming them for not knowing the language (ofcourse the younger generation should learn it at school), but it`s also a fault of our government. Studying Estonian has become extremely expensive. it`s a known fact that Russians, who don`t speak EStonian, have very low salaries. So ofcourse they can`t afford any language courses.

there`s 75 000 workers in Tallinn , with Russian background and not speaking Estonian. All of them have to face the same problems - lack of money and fear to fail the exam, because the government is not the one who pays for language courses. And because of that most of them don`t even try to take that step.

I think that we should give the people, who wish to learn our language, a compensation for studies. It will make their life here easier and also help us to keep our official language.In that way Russians will understand us better and perhaps the anger between nations will decrease, because at this point Russians and Estonians are fighting with each-other like white and black people, blaming other in racism. If there`s something we could do about it, then this is something that would work - free language courses.

Limits of one`s language means the limits of one`s world.