@JonathanReezSupportsMonica haha, I currently can't even get an ESTA thanks to my Iran visit :)

@gerrit latest episode of podcast "Stuff they don't want you to know" is about closed cities. Coincidence? ;)

does "flight reservation" refer to a flight ticket which has been paid or just a flight order which has not been paid?

Hey is anyone here a digital nomad? Have you looked at any of the digital nomad visas or startup residence permits? I've just been offered to join a startup in Estonia which does not yet have any money but would get me a 5 year residence permit. And I'd be allowed to work here in a regular job while doing the startup. I'm not sure it's too good and I'm missing something? The guy who asked me is already on the startup residence permit and says he would do all the forms...

@hippietrail, on my US layout keyboard(s) with Alt Gr (right alt) it is under the 5 (with that alt GR)

Never had one with no key working as Alt GR, whether mentioned or not.

US layout, European bought laptops and computers.

@Willeke: Are you on Windows?

yes, win 10.

so you can just hit right-alt and 5 and you get a euro symbol?

because that definitely doesn't work for me. i just tried again. also in combination with the control key and with the fn key

it does work with the "US international" keyboard layout, but i don't like how that changes the semantics of the ' and " keys

As I do not program I can not help you there.

I know you can (on most computers) change the use of one key to a new symbol, I do not know how to do it, as I have always suffered the copy and paste method myself. (But I do not use a keyboard to earn a living.)

i've looked into making keyboard layouts several times over the years, it is much more involved than you would think. microsoft's old internationalization guru Michael Kaplan used to have a great blog that covered many things including that

my SU question surprisingly got a few good answers. i thought it might just get killed since it's been asked many times before

there's an emoji picker but there's also a way to use the Fn and Alt keys together and type the Unicode number via the regular keys substituting as numeric keyboard - sounds hideous but it works

I have tried to get used to other keyboards in the past and never really got it. I can and do get used to the symbols moved around. But the letters moved and the numbers under shift but the symbols without shift gets me every time I borrow a French keyboard.

I followed the link to your question, I was amazed to how wide the range of answers came.

At one time I had to do some typesetting kind of work, at work, and I had a sheet handy with how to get the most common symbols, including dingbats and alike fonts, but I forgot all that as soon as the job changed and I did not have to do it anymore.

@hippietrail, how do you like Estonia?

It is/was one of the favorite countries of my best friends parents, (he passed away) and the other two were the neighbours Latvia and Lithuania.

They have the habit of chatting with everybody (even when they do not have any language in common) and making long lasting friends that way.

@Willeke So far I really love it. Tallin is pretty. People in my hostel are friendly, mostly Russian-speaking Estonians. I would like to meet more locals and learn some Estonian, there is no app for Estonian. I've started learning Russian. I wish I had more money to try the food. I'll be looking for more used bookshops tomorrow to enhance my collection of translations of One Hundred Years of Solitude (-:

the baltic countries are the ones i've missed on other europtrips that i most wanted to visit so i'm so lucky the cheapest flight from thailand brought me right here

Is Estonian the one language that is closest to Finish or the one that only has a 'close' connection with Lithuanian?

I met a couple last summer, she was from Lithuania, he from England and he remarked on how unrelated to other languages Lithuanian is.

Not that being related to Finnish will be that helpful unless you happen to speak that.

yes but it's too far from finnish to use a finnish language app here. latvian and lithuanian are close to each other.

lithuanian is related to english, but not close. further than german but closer than armenian or hindi

i'd wager that lithuanian is probably the hardest indoeuropean language of europe to learn, though icelandic could give stiff competition. unless you count armenia as europe.

My friends had to rely on German and English, and their native Dutch of course. They did manage quite well in all of the Baltic countries.

I do not think Icelandic that much of a challenge. I did already understand quite a bit from being derived from Norse. As is Norwegian which I do understand quite a bit.

it always gets listed in difficult languages but without anyone to ask i've had my doubts. so thanks for that.

But not living in Iceland I have never really tried to learn the language. (And everybody I met spoke English and often several more.

i guess it's easier for scandinavians than english speakers though

here the poorer people only speak russian

Dutch is also listed in the difficult languages and indeed to learn to pronounce Dutch right you need to be really talented or start young. But to learn to understand and speak to be understood is much less hard.

latvian latvians seem to speak at least estonian, russian, and english. russian estonians only a minority seem to speak english or estonian. from my limited 4 or 5 days exposure here

really? the only hard thing about dutch is that nobody will speak it with somebody they know speaks english so it's impossible to practice

When listening to Icelandic on the radio (in a bus) I had the impression I heard Dutch, not the words but the melody of the sentences and the overall sound.

everybody speaks english and very few have perfect pronunciation. usually you don't need perfect pronunciation. even in chinese and thai i found that to be true.

i think icelandic is more archaic that danish or swedish, but some norwegians dialects are probably pretty archaic too. i think faroese is even more archaic

Dutch has a whole series of letters/sounds that are not common in other languages. Often languages have a few but never the whole series. But the basic grammar is much easier than say German or Spanish and a wide range of pronounciations is acceptable.

Icelandic claims to be pure Norse but it has changed. And they can not stop change anymore these days.

ha try georgian sometime. even chinese for that matter. pinyin makes it looks like it has the same sounds as english, but that turns out to be a lie

i find spanish grammar easier. dutch is surely easier than german though. icelandic changed less than some languages but it has certainly changed and they have changed the orthography a couple of times in just the past century or so to keep up with the changes

I am happy with just two languages and understanding a lot more. I could make sense of German, French, Spanish, Italian, Norse and some Swedish, as well as several of the Dutch dialects and most versions of English.

the only european ones that still really interest me are the weirdest and rarest ones

i didn't get as far with my thai as i'd hoped but i think i did well enough with my chinese. it's good after to be useful to some extent when i randomly meet chinese people

Chinese is a difficult one, as it is not a language but a group of languages. My friend who learned Mandarin as a child (after 4 local languages from being a baby) now often works with people who speak Cantonese. They often have to write down what they need to know.

well unless you're in hong kong you're not going to deal with any other kind realistically. even if you're like me and you go in search of other kinds of chinese because you love languages.

@CaptainBohemian usuallly a single 'reservation' with a PNR (6 digit code like FNH2AH), which may include multiple legs.

@hippietrail if you have other clients who would pay money to your Estonian business entity (self employed people are effectively a one-person business entity) and you want to live in the Schengen area indefinitely, it could be a good option

As you'd pay low tax as a self employed person