Lost In Translation...or am I?

Perceiving information in another language is always an adventure, but when the language is something that closely resembles your own but still doesn't make sense in your brain, it's a rollercoaster.

As I made a short trip to Estonia I thought a lot about the way I process new information in another language. In English it's natural by now, and for example in German it just needs some brain work and it will come to me, Basically what it needs is tuning your brain to the needed frequency. But fine tuning when the language is very similar to your native language turned out to be a disaster as I set my foot in Tallinn and realized I had completely lost my connection to communication skills.

Why, tho? Shouldn't communicating and reading information in Estonian be rather easy since Estonian and Finnish are language siblings? Apparently not. My brain went to a shutdown mode where I couldn't figure out which language to use when trying to process information or to communicate with people, which led to me being very confused for a good while in the beginning. The fact that I understood a good deal of the words around me and could even make out some sentences but not use them like in my mind they are supposed to be used was just too big of a culture shock.

At that moment when I was desperately trying to tune my confused brain to Estonian frequency I felt like a robot that is meant to understand and process human speech but that is lost in a loop of not making out the overall sentence of the separate words in order to react accordingly. It was truly a scary moment.

This has been a very weird media diary of me momentarily not understanding media at all.