since my language log is in Dutch and not many users read it, plus I very seldom add an entry to it, for many of you would be surprising to hear that I'm studying Bulgarian. For some of you the real problem would be "eh? who are you? first time I read something from you", which is understandable, but ok
Understandably I didn't get a single "you are study Bulgarian??? Cool, me too! Hey, I speak C2 Bulgarian! Hey, it is in my language wishlist!" and if I got it, then I woke up all sweaty
So yes, I feel the desire to talk about it. I would especially like to hear if someone of you had experience with it or with languages related to it, like Macedonian or more far away, Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian, and got to read some Bulgarian for fun or met some native speaker and tried communicating etc. These kind of things.
So far I think I have a vocabulary of around 400 words plus all the loans coming from Latin or whatever other language I know.
Learning the vocabulary is in my experience the biggest obstacle since my learning method always puts reading and listening central.
It is also my first Slavic language, although I can understand some Slavic words due some previous study of Romanian.
So these are my findings, so far:
- alphabet/pronunciation: über easy. Cyrillic is fantastic and very phonetic. This is especially true with Bulgarian. I can hear new words in Bulgarian and write them down correctly 95% of the times. Dutch was much tougher in this aspect. The first time I heard the word "vereniging" I wrote down "ferenefijn" lol. When I make mistakes in Bulgarian it is almost always "с" vs "з" or "я" vs "ия".
- stress: not great. I tend to get it right the 60% of the times but I don't know why and it looks there are no rules.
- grammar: easy(ish). Three genders, but easy to distinguish because they are easily derived by the endings (consonant for masculine, a for feminine, other vowel for neuter). Vocative case and accusative for personal pronouns. Clear word order. The pronouns are quite logical, less messy than in Germanic languages in my opinion. There is the verb to be unlike other Slavic languages, there is determined article (although postfixed like Romanian). The verbal system is the worst of all Slavic languages, but I don't actually need to learn everything about it to communicate at a basic level.
- vocabulary: obviously difficult unless you know already a slavic language, but enough foreign loans to have some discount.
As a fact I find it much less daunting than I found Dutch years ago (but I do have much more experience now). As a difficulty I would compare it with German. Where German is difficult, Bulgarian is easy (ex genders, plurals, cases, world order). Where German is easy, Bulgarian is daunting (especially verbs).
Some thoughts from you guys? Благодаря!
), and I intend to do something about it.
