Dario Hamidi, engineering manager at Bolt, has been living in Estonia for nine years. "I used to visit every chance I got before that," he noted, explaining that it was the Estonian language that made him start coming to Estonia.

Estonian came to Hamidi 17 years ago through Finnish. "I used to listen to a lot of music in Finnish, a lot of heavy metal, which is very popular in Germany. I got the idea of learning Finnish from there. Finnish is like programming, it is highly logical and without irregularities. I discovered Estonian by chance as something that works like Finnish but has a lot of German words, which I found exciting. I wanted to know where those German words came from. I started brushing up on history and quickly understood how it happened. This started my interest in Estonia."

Hamidi also teaches Estonian to other foreigners, having created a side business that promises to teach the language in a single day. "You obviously cannot learn every word in a day, while you can learn how a language works. That is the main breaking point – if you speak English or Spanish, Estonian doesn't work like that. Estonian is very difficult unless someone explains to you how it works. What I do is explain the workings of Estonian," he said.

In a little over a year, Hamidi has helped 115 people interested in Estonian. "Ideally, I will not have to see them again. I will help if help is needed, of course, but if I do my job well, they have no reason to come back."

The German is not quick to believe in linguistic talent. "People often tell me I have a knack for languages, but I disagree. The only difference is that I turn to languages when I'm bored. I simply take a bigger interest than others. That is why I spend a lot more time on these things – if other people spent as much time on languages as I do, the results would be similar," Hamidi, who has also learned Latin, Greek, Turkish and Hungarian, said.

When learning new languages, well begun is half done, Hamidi believes. "You need to talk to people and accept that you'll make mistakes. The main thing is that you'll learn from them," he said.

Hamidi's experience with students and colleagues tells him that keeping one's motivation up is the single greatest challenge when learning Estonian. "You can get everything done with English or Russian in Estonia. If you just want to exist here, you do not need [to speak] the language. At least not in Tallinn," he said, adding that it is also the case in many others countries. "On one hand, it is good because it brings people here and some of them do end up learning the local language. While if learning a language is not your number one priority, you don't have to do it."

Another problem is that foreigners do not have Estonian friends. "Estonians aren't really introverted, but they like spending time with people they got to know in school. These friend groups are stable and slow to change, which makes it hard to bring in new people. That is to say that many who come here do not have Estonian friends. They could try and change that, which is when they'll also get a taste for learning the language," he believes.

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