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It must confuse English learners to hear phrases like, "I'm home", instead of "I am at home." We don't say I'm school, or I'm post office.

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ParabolicMotion@lemmy.world
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showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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boonhet@lemm.ee
5 points

English at least has “going to” and “will” for future. In Estonian you just use present simple and the only way to know you’re talking about the future is if you hint it with some time related word.

You just say “I go to the supermarket” and it’s ambiguous. You say “I go to the supermarket tomorrow” and you know it’s talking about the future.

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merc@sh.itjust.works
2 points

Do you know if that’s unique to Estonian, or also true of Finnish? AFAIK, Finnish (and Estonian) are a weird language branch in that most of Europe is Indo-European. Even distinct languages like Italian and German are more related to each-other than Finnish.

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siipale@sopuli.xyz
2 points

It’s the same way in Finnish.

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boonhet@lemm.ee
1 point

I used grammatically incorrect examples on purpose to point out there’s no present simple vs present continuous distinction in Estonian either.

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