Kodukeel means home language. You live here now, and this is where the words start to hold up: fifteen quiet minutes a day of practice that sticks, a conversation to rehearse with somebody who has an agenda of their own, and one small thing to say out loud today.
Learn three forms, get most of the rest
You can hold a 400-day streak and still freeze when somebody speaks to you at the counter. Three forms of a word are yours to learn, sometimes four. Everything after them is the same regular endings every time, and where a word breaks the pattern you get the form Estonians say beside the one the rule predicts. Press a word and watch.
The three cases you learn
The eleven that come with them
What you get
Three parts, and they work together. A word you ask Anu about becomes a card, and the plan decides which evening it comes back.
Ask her the thing you would not ask in class. She will build a sentence with you, read the one you wrote, and say why the ending changed. Every Estonian word she shows you is looked up, never guessed at.
Look a word up and it becomes a card in one press, every form, audio in twelve voices. Then 82 units of them, brought back the day before you would forget, and heard the way people say them: at speed, over café noise, down a phone line.
A receptionist with no slot on Thursday, a landlord on a bad line, a counter with a queue. Rehearse the conversation, then take the smallest step outside: one thing to say to a real person today, and a count of how it went. That count is the only score that matters here.
Questions
Short answers, and how this compares with the other apps is at the end.
No, and there is nothing to set up. A handful of things cost real money to run, so Anu, the writing grader and the camera have a daily allowance, and a normal evening never reaches one.
Every form and example sentence comes from Ekilex, run by the Institute of the Estonian Language, and every English gloss from Wiktionary or the course itself. An AI is never allowed to write an Estonian form: it invents plausible ones that are wrong, and a flashcard would drill the mistake straight in. Where Anu translates a sentence for you, it says so on the sentence.
It runs A1 to C1, and the parts that stay hard are taught on their own: a card for consonant gradation, a card for the case each verb demands, and a unit and a grammar page for whether an object is whole or partial. There is a level check if you would rather not guess where you are, and a mock state examination paper at A2, B1, B2 and C1.
That is what it is for. Situations puts you in front of somebody with an agenda of their own, a receptionist, a landlord, a clerk, and marks you against the dictionary rather than a model, so you cannot be told you were wrong when you were right. Today sets one small errand to do out loud, and Progress counts how those went, including the times somebody switched to English. Nothing here scores your pronunciation, because the only recognizer available gets native speakers wrong, and we would rather say so than pretend.
It stays in your account, and you can download all of it from Settings whenever you like. Your review history is the one thing we could never rebuild, so nothing in it is ever changed or deleted.
Duolingo has never offered Estonian, so the real choice is between the tools that do. Of ten claims checked against their own public pages, somebody else earns a tick on seven. None of them is trying to get you to ma lähen tuppa and knowing why it is not tuba.
Free, with no subscription
Built for Estonian and nothing else
Teaches the case system case by case
Every form shows the dictionary it came from
Brings a word back on the day you would forget it
Any word you look up becomes a card
Explains why the answer was wrong
Keeps working with no connection
Rehearses a conversation with somebody who has an agenda of their own
Counts the conversations you have outside it
Speakly
Built in Estonia, and the fastest way to get 4,000 common words into your ear. It costs money.
Keeleklikk and Keeletee
Free state-funded courses with a real teacher answering by email. Start there, and keep this open beside it.
Anki
Schedules anything you are willing to type. Finding the Estonian is your job, and so is getting it right.
The vocabulary apps
Drops, Mondly, Memrise, Ling and the rest do words well. This is aimed at which form of the word, and why.
A tick is yes, a dash is their pages not saying so, a question mark is us not being able to tell. Checked in August 2026 against each product’s own site. Every name belongs to its owner and none of them has endorsed this. If something is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
The next time somebody speaks to you in Estonian, you will have something to say back, and you will have said it before.
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