Cracking the Estonian B1 level exam: Wisdom, and learnings

TL;DR: Summary

Speakly, Estonian language mom, Estonian colleagues, E Nagu Eesti, and Keeletee

Speakly did most of the heavy lifting, as I’ve spent a few years with the app. At the beginning of 2025, I signed up for a chat based course run by Mall Pesti, who encouraged me to attempt the B1 level exam since she thought I was ready. I was not convinced, so I supplemented my learning with Keeletee. I was quite serious with my preparation and spent at least half an hour every day for a couple of months. Then I attempted the exam successfully.

For those interested in the full story, some hard-earned wisdom and well-meaning advice: Keep reading.

The beginning

I began my journey with learning Estonian before I even set foot in Estonia. This was way back in 2020, a little over five years ago. I had just received the acceptance letter from the University of Tartu for the Master’s in Computer Science program. Knowing that I would be spending two years in Estonia I started looking for ways to learn the language. Duolingo didn’t and still doesn’t offer Estonian on their platform. So I looked for an alternative. A few google searches took me to Speakly, and at the time I found a promotion campaign related to Estonia’s celebration of 100 years of independence. Thanks to that I was able to get a one year subscription, and thus began my journey with learning this interesting language.

Winning a lifetime membership to Speakly

Time goes by and I reach Estonia in late 2020. I had kept up my learning on Speakly, but at a very gentle pace. I had my “Tere!” (Hello), “Aitäh!” (Thank you), “Vabandage!” (Excuse me and sorry) down with fair pronunciation. Then came the Speakly Success Stories Project in November 2020.

The challenge was to learn 10 Estonian words on the app for 90 days. Considering it was the first semester of my Masters in Computer Science it was quite a commitment to keep up the streak. The first semester is notoriously hectic where assignments and deadlines take up all of your time. Not to mention, it was my first winter in the Baltics. It was quite a challenge, however, I stuck with it and kept going.

After completing the project, I had a great call with Ott Ojamets, the CEO of the Speakly, and won a lifetime membership. The main idea behind the challenge, in my opinion, was to figure out how people use the app, and conduct user research. So it was a win-win for learners and the company.

Links to the beginning and the end of project on Facebook:

Day 1 of the Speakly Success Stories Project,

Day 90 of the Speakly Success Stories Project

I kept using the app, and still use it to this day. My longest streak on the app was 535 days, that is almost one and a half years.

Funnily enough, I won another competition from Speakly, and a second lifetime membership as well. That’s a story for another day however.

Finding Küllike, my Estonian language mom

Midway through the Success Stories Project, I realised that my pronunciation wasn’t proper. I could hear the way the voices sounded from the app, and the way I was saying things. They just didn’t match. So I set out to find helpful people on the internet. I made a post on the facebook group, Foreigners in Tartu, looking for a “language parent”. My idea at the time was to get someone to read Estonian story books, and learn to mimic the sounds. The post got a lot of positive engagement, and a few interested locals reached out to me. Of course, some ghosted me right after the first couple of messages. Either way, I managed to set up meetings with a couple of the kind souls soon after. One of the people who responded was Küllike Pihkva, a local Estonian woman in her early fifties and an absolute gem of a human being. I could fill up an entire post about all the amazing things she does. I will leave a word puddle of things related to her: Küllike dances salsa, studied to be a vocational teacher, then signed up for a masters, has a full time job, has three dogs, and organises camouflage netting workshops every week among other things. Did I mention that she is in her fifties? Yep, she is. She is the epitome of the phrase: I’ll sleep when I’m dead. So apart from many Latinos I also get to say that I dance salsa with my mom.

Getting back to my Estonian journey, Küllike and I set up a semi-regular meeting schedule. We met a handful of times and soon we realised that it wasn’t the most optimal arrangement for learning the language. Although language learning fell by the wayside, a wonderful relationship took root. Everytime I meet someone along with Küllike, she introduces me as her “burnt bread” son in jest. And on my part, as promised in my original post, I’m quite a grateful language son.

Polishing my pronunciation with Estonian colleagues

Time goes by, and I stop learning Estonian for a while to focus on studies and go on other adventures. In late 2022, I completed my master’s program and started working as a Data Engineer at STACC, a small data science consulting outfit. I was the only non-Estonian employee there. I know my way around situations where I’m the black sheep (brown sheep if I may) since I’ve been in similar situations before. I’ve been the only non-Hebrew speaker in a tiny village in Southern Israel for example. My trump card for such situations: humour, and self-deprecation. One joke that I invite others to steal is this one. When entering a room full of Estonians, mischievously announce, “English has entered the chat!”. Unfortunately, that was every room I entered, so it got boring very quickly.

Getting back to learning Estonian, since I am around Estonians a lot, I figure I will get back to studying the language. So I enlist my colleagues to teach me, who all very graciously accept to teach me. All of this was very fluid, they taught me a word or two here and there. At lunch time we’d sit down and read something together, or just chat in Estonglish.

I have to highlight one very important exercise that overhauled my pronunciation. I came across this webpage from Pille ja Lauri lood. I believe it is part of speech therapy intended for people who have trouble with their pronunciation. I was an ideal patient. I printed out the worksheets, and for a few sessions, I’d sit with my colleague Kaspar Valk, and he’d patiently read out the words from the worksheet, and I’d mimic him. These exercises were quite hard, but they completely overhauled my pronunciation. I highly recommend this exercise to all those who struggle to say: “Anna õlu üle Ülo õe õla” everytime Estonians try to pull a fast one over you.

This post wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention Kaspar Jesmin, the little hacker boy, who taught me to look at the light side of things. I also have to highlight Evely Kukk, who has given me a pearl of wisdom in her: “I am learning English, and I will speak it loudly and wrongly”. It really gave me confidence to make mistakes and use the language. Thinking about those times always brings a smile to my face.

I’m quite grateful for the time and energy that everyone at STACC spent on teaching me Estonian.

Getting serious: E nagu Eesti, Keeletee

Again time goes by, and I stop learning Estonian for a while to focus on a new job and go on other adventures. Then come 2025, I decide that I want to take up the B1 level exam sometime during the year. So I got a little serious and signed up for a chat based course with Mall Pesti, who is the author of one of the most famous Estonian textbooks called E nagu Eesti. It is a 10 week course, where Mall assigns reading material for the week from the textbook, and then once a week you chat with her and your peers at the same level. She corrects your grammar in the chat, and you fix your mistakes as you go.

As part of the course she also offers two 1:1 video lessons, where you speak with her. In the second video lesson, she encouraged me to already attempt the B1 level test. I was quite skeptical that I was ready. However, I took her advice, and signed up for the test in the second quarter of 2025. Now the date of the exam was set. I had the exam coming up in May. I had to get even more serious about learning.

I doubled down on my preparation and started working through Keeletee, a web-based learning environment for learning Estonian on your own. Little did I know that there are real teachers who send you feedback on the exercises that you do on the webpages. This is again a wonderful resource that most people are not aware of.

To make an already long story longer, I keep grinding away at the Keeletee and do the exercises there. I also enlist the help of Gopichand Gopini, who is a fellow Telugu here in Tartu, and probably the only other guy after Joseph Haske, who I know is extremely serious about learning Estonian. He was looking at the B2 level exam. So we decided to meetup once a week to study Estonian together. I worked through Keeletee, and he worked through some advanced Estonian grammar voodoo.

Exam day: 18-May-2025

Now the exam day comes along, I go take the exam. I find the writing part quite easy, the rest were all challenging for me. Especially the listening and the speaking parts. We had a slight technical problem when the teachers played the audio files of the listening parts. We heard echoes, possibly because the file was being played twice with a short delay between the plays. I got paired with an amazing speaking partner, who really helped me out with the speaking. I’ve heard horror stories of people being paired with arrogant pricks who make it harder for their speaking partners in the exam. So I got lucky in my pairing.

In the end, I passed the exam with 78%, which apparently is a respectable score. Nothing to write home about, but good enough to write a long ass blog post for sure. For those interested, I had the following score breakdown between the various components: Writing: Good (76-90%), Listening: Good (76-90%), Reading: Good (76-90%), Speaking: Satisfactory (60-75%). Clearly my speaking needs a lot of work.

Advice

I’ve had a few conversations with friends and other expats who are also looking at learning the language, especially as the immigration laws get stricter with every passing year. Here’s my advice to prospective Estonian language learners.

Just get started

You can get to the A2 level, all on your own with the free tools that we have available. Speakly, or keeleklikk are amazing resources that will get you to the A2 level. So pick up these tools and JUST. DO. IT. (Insert Shia LaBeouf motivational video)

Consistency beats tooling

I spent a few months looking for the best way to learn, and later realised that is a fool’s errand. The most important thing is to spend time learning and staying consistent. Looking for the best tools or techniques is just a way to procrastinate and not do the hard work of learning the language. So my advice would be to try a few tools at the beginning and stick to one that you prefer. Aim for consistency, and the tools won’t matter.

Slow down when you learn

When working with the apps, it is very tempting to feel that you are making progress at a lightning pace. The apps are built to be sticky, the sound effects, and the UI all designed to provide the illusion of progress. Unfortunately, the gamification of language learning has collectively fooled us into believing that we can actually learn a language effortlessly, and at the speed of light. I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but in my experience language learning doesn’t come easy. Especially a language that is completely different from all the languages that you know.

At some point, I realised that language learning is not a game, it is a difficult skill. As with every difficult skill, you need to give your brain time to process what you’ve given it. One way to do that is to slow down, way down.

The best way, I’ve found to slow down, is to actually write every sentence that you come across in the app. I’ve filled up a couple of notebooks with sentences that I came across on Speakly. The physical act of writing slows you down. A word of caution when you try to slow down. Your brain will play tricks on you, and will try to weasel its way out of this. But you have to remember that slowing down is necessary. Over time it will become a habit.

Most of the advice above applies to a lot of other skills as well. So, go out there and get started with your learning journey.

Now, to close this blog post in classic Speakly fashion:

Ma loodan, et sulle meeldis see lugu ja et see oli sinu jaoks inspireeriv! Muideks, soovitan sulle üht head trikki mis aitab sul eesti keelt palju kiiremini õppida…

Ei ole mingeid trikid, ainult “consistency” ja “repetition”. (These are B2 level words, which I don’t know yet! Also remember, loudly and wrongly!)