As a Swedish speaker, I get this deeply rooted feeling of righteous indignation about not understanding spoken Danish. I'm only half-joking.
As a Finnish speaker, I don't get that feeling with Estonian. The written form is different enough to warrant a deeper look before I start whining about how annoying I find language studies in general.
As a Finnish speaker, to me Estonian sometimes sounds like I'm having a stroke. Like I'm supposed to understand what is spoken but the words just don't resolve into their meanings.
My wife said something similar when we went for a holiday from Finland to Estonia; the words sounded like they should mean something, but they didn't. She kept suggesting the Estonians were very very drunk!
My Finnish is poor enough that I didn't recognize any of the alleged similiarities.
No it isn't :) As a Finnish speaker with some exposure to Estonian language, I can understand written and spoken Estonian better than any other language I've had such little exposure to. I'm not very good in speaking Estonian and I can't write it at all.
Out of curiosity, how did you go about picking up this fluency in Estonian? Are there any good sources of particularly easy Estonian to get started? I'm semi-interested.
Granted, I'm also super lazy, but Finnish and Estonian should be close enough to just have some threshold to get over until it's pretty smooth, I guess?
Fwiw, I'm native in Swedish, but I speak and write Finnish daily.
To go on about my earlier comparison, I can really visit the site for a Danish or Norwegian Bokmål newspaper like Politiken ( https://politiken.dk ) or Verdens Gang ( https://www.vg.no/ ) and start reading with a feeling of just moderate confusion. Academic text would require some extra effort. The "voice in my head" or mode of reading doesn't really even change, because I've never attempted to communicate in either Danish or Norwegian per se.
For Estonian Postimees (https://www.postimees.ee ) I'm stuck pretty much immediately. I can pick up words and some context, but that's it.
At my first job, at an internal IT Service Desk for a certain Nordic energy company, I dealt with Norwegians and Danes. But it was a business context where everyone just seemed to agree to just make a polite effort at having a maybe slightly "clear in a Swedish way" common Scandinavians language, because switching to English would feel a little silly. I guess some of the older dudes working in the field somewhere in Norway might not have spoken English.
Even basic Estonian vocabulary is surprisingly different from Finnish. Educated guesses only help you so far due to a large number of false friends and false cognates (some of them rather amusing, eg. hallitus meaning "government" in Finnish and "mold" (as in fungus) in Estonian, or Estonian pulmad meaning "a wedding reception" but Finnish pulmat meaning "problems" or "troubles"!)
Many words in standard Estonian do have true cognates in Finnish, but the Finnish counterparts have a slightly different or more specific meaning, or are nonstandard or colloquial. A typical example would be maja which in Estonian means "house" or "building" but in Finnish has the more specific meaning of "hut" or "cabin"—a dwelling more rudimentary and temporary in nature.
I'm not sure about an answer to your question, but something to look out for are false friends. There are plenty of Finnish and Estonian words that sound the same or similar, but mean something different. Eg
I'm not fluent at all. I had several long vacations there as a child, visit every now and then and have some exposure to news and culture. And I'm pretty good in getting a superficial understanding of a language, good enough to read or listen to news and understand the gist of it. I can handle several languages I have never formally studied.
With Danish it really depends where in Denmark the speaker is from. I usually have a hard time understanding anything at all, but some accents are funny sounding but understandable.
As a (non-fluent) Spanish speaker I get a similar experience hearing Portuguese, the words sound similar but different and the speaker sounds slightly drunk.
Greek sounds very close to Spanish but none of the words mean anything, it's really weird :)
For the sake of hilarity, let's add that Icelandic people are forced to study Danish in school Because Reasons. Icelandic is not mutually intelligible with the major Scandinavian languages, even in written form. The argument for studying Danish is of course that everyone benefits from Nordic countries sticking together.
But Danish is the most cumbersome way to get some of that benefit of a common language.
Some Icelandic professor character actually recently dropped a hot take, suggesting that Icelandic schools could switch to teach some form of Finland Swedish, because it'd be remarkably easy for Icelandic speakers to pronounce and probably the easiest option for most people in the Nordics to grasp relative to effort.
https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u...
Being a Swedish speaker from Helsinki, Finland, I kind of don't like the nasality of my own dialect. I'd prefer to listen to dialects from the Swedish west coast around Gothernburg all day, because those are very soft sounding. But the suggestion likely makes some sense. Formal/common institutional spoken Finland Swedish is indeed overly articulated and devoid of slang.
Informal Finland Swedish tends to be hyperlocal and may carry loan words from Finnish, which is a non-starter in the other Nordic countries, and very much frowned upon by Swedish schools in Finland.
As a Finnish speaker, I don't get that feeling with Estonian. The written form is different enough to warrant a deeper look before I start whining about how annoying I find language studies in general.