A course for a language the world overlooked

Selgeks started with a small, stubborn frustration: you can’t learn Estonian on Duolingo. Or Babbel. With barely over a million speakers, Estonian keeps getting skipped by the apps that taught the world Spanish and French. The people who need it most — new residents, partners of Estonians, returning families, anyone facing the state exam — were left with dry textbooks and scattered tools.

So we built the course we wished existed: rigorous enough for the A2 exam (with B1 on the roadmap), but wrapped in a story you’d actually want to return to. Every word is checked against Sõnaveeb / EKI, Estonia’s official dictionary. Every sentence is one you can fully decode. And a barn swallow named Pääsu walks the whole map of Estonia beside you.

The story behind the story

The fairy tale — a grandmother’s lost song, the Hall Mees who erases forgotten words — isn’t decoration. It’s a memory system. A reason to come back tomorrow. Because the truth about learning a hard language is boring: the people who succeed are simply the ones who keep showing up. Our whole job is to make showing up feel like an adventure.