We spent a LOT of time on grammar - both Estonian grammar and the grammar of any foreign language we learned (for me it was Russian, English, German and Norwegian in school as far as foreign languages went). I'm not sure how things stand now but we had Estonian language as a separate subject from literature, and the ~4 hours of language a week, from the first week of school until the last, was more or less all grammar. With foreign languages there was a more or less equal emphasis on grammar and vocabulary.
And I do think it's made learning other languages easier for me, as it's easier to grasp the underlying concepts of other languages - the building blocks, the way different parts of sentences go together, the way thoughts are expressed. (Not that I don't make mistakes in any language I've learned - I do, and frequently so, but it's mostly because my brain is in a constant state of multi-lingual confusion.)
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Originally Posted by Andrew H.
German only has 4 cases; Latin and Russian both have 6, IIRC, and Finnish has some implausible number in the teens.
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Finnish has fifteen, I believe, although I think there has been some discussion on whether the accusative case should even be considered separate or not, as it's in practice covered by nominative and genitive - it's not a separate case in Estonian where nominative, genitive or partitive are used as appropriate. Estonian has 14 officially recognised cases, although one or two others are occasionally discussed by linguists as existing in reality but not recognised as such.
I've never considered English a particularly difficult language to learn - I think if you go down into it very deeply, into the grammar and the rules, it does get complex (as does almost any language I'm aware of), but it's IMHO a relatively easy language for foreigners to get fluent in on an everyday level of understanding, speaking and writing. German and Russian were both far more difficult for me.