BONJOUR L'ESTONIE

Estonia casts a wary eye toward Russia, while leaning on NATO

The three countries, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, were all part of the Soviet Union, like Ukraine, but are all also now members of NATO, unlike Ukraine. While that should provide a measure of protection, leaders there are still nervous.

In a recent interview, Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet said he hoped the situation in Crimea and Ukraine would stabilize and that direct talks between Russia and Ukraine would begin soon. Paet says he's deeply concerned by Russia’s stated belief that they “have some sort of right to protect Russian minorities everywhere in the world.”

Everybody is aware, Paet says, that the Russian immigrant population is increasing in many European societies. That would seem to imply more Russian intervention in more places.

“Russia’s posture has no place in the 21st Century,” Paet says. Estonia has good reason to be concerned about Russia’s actions in Crimea. In the early years of World War II, Russia invaded and occupied Estonia. Tens of thousands of Estonians, including almost all the nation's political leaders, were executed or deported to labor camps, where most of them died. In 1949, under Joseph Stalin, more than 20,000 Estonians were deported, accused of being disloyal to the Soviet Union.

Lingvist raises €1 million to reduce the time it takes to learn a new language

Estonian startup Lingvist, which is developing “adaptive” language learning software that it claims significantly reduces the time it takes to learn a new language, has raised a €1 million round of funding. The investment comes from SmartCap (the investment arm of the taxpayer-funded Estonian Development Fund), Nordic VC Inventure, and several angel investors from Estonia and elsewhere.

Founded just over a year ago by Mait Müntel, Ott Jalakas and Andres Koern, the company’s inception came about after Müntel, who has a background in physics and had been working at CERN for several years, became interested in learning French. As he began researching what online/digital language learning solutions already existed, none of which he found were up to scratch, he reasoned that by subjecting languages to statistical analysis in order to establish frequencies and correlations and by optimising the “memorisation process” it would be possible to drastically reduce the time needed to learn a new language.