Bulgarian

[Speakeasy]

Would anyone happen to know if the two Bulgarian courses, by Carleton T. Hodge, are the same?

Bulgarian Basic Course (1961) by Carleton T. Hodge – FSI (Foreign Services Institute)
Materials: 2 course manuals, x?x audio cassettes. Available via Yojik website.

Spoken Bulgarian (1980 reprint?) by Carleton T. Hodge – SLS (Spoken Language Services)
Materials: 2 course manuals, 18 audio cassettes. Very rare and quite expensive.

These are, in fact, the same course. Not too long ago, I purchased a second-hand, low-priced set of the SLS Spoken Bulgarian audio cassette tapes, the course manuals were not included.

Spoken Bulgarian (SLS) cassettes 1.jpg

I digitized the first tape in the SLS collection and compared it to the corresponding mp3 file of the FSI Bulgarian Basic Course which is freely-available on the Yojik.eu website. They’re the same. So then, should any of you be tempted by the offer on AbeBooks for the complete course, you needn’t bother.

SLS Spoken Bulgarian (AbeBooks).JPG

PS: Should anyone wish to add the set of SLS Spoken Bulgarian audio cassettes to their own collection of vintage language-learning materials, I would be quite willing to surrender them FREE of charge. If no one is interested, they’ll end up in the TRASH (the local charitable organizations no longer accept such items, the local sellers of used books don’t want these types of items, and the municipal authorities have, for all practical purposes, abandoned their recycling programme; so, into the trash bin they’ll go!

EDITED:
Generous offer of audio cassettes.

[Daristani]

Thanks much for the generous offer of the cassettes (on which I'll pass, for the sake of a continued wary peace with my wife over the volume of such materials piling up beside our bed.)

I just wanted to chime in to note the relative wealth of materials for a language with relatively few speakers; maybe we can thank the Cold War, at least for the DLI and FSI courses.

A couple of other notes on Bulgarian materials:

1) There have actually been two different Colloguial Bulgarian books with audio. The first was by George D. Papantchev, and the current one is by Kjetil Ra Hauge and Yovka Tisheva.

2) The Assimil course is also available in a German base, as well as the original French base.

[Iversen]

Maybe I'm in trouble, but actually I find Bulgarian closer to Russian than to English, albeit firmly situated within the Balkan Sprachbund.

The postclitic articles are a nostalgic link to my own native Danish, but also to Albanian, while the aorist ties it with Greek - although the two kinds of aorists aren't used in quite the same way. And the composite past tense links it with most other Slavic languages - except Russian, which has lost the auxiliary part of it, leaving only a participle which is totally unknown in English.

Apart from that I don't find that the language is too incredibly hard to understand - and one day I'll also try to learn to speak it. At least its nominal morphology is the simplest one among all the Slavic languages (with Sorbian and Slovenian at the other end of the spectrum because of the dualis).

I can't vouch for Macedonian - I have never studied it.

[Janusz2020]

Have you still been studying Bulgarian? My mother tongue is Bulgarian

[Iversen]

Have you still been studying Bulgarian? My mother tongue is Bulgarian

You don't specify whom you are asking - but for my part I can certify that I still do study Bulgarian. Within the last week I have reread several chapters in my grammar, done wordlists and studied a text about a composer named Емануил Манолов. Normally I would have been more active, but right now I'm in the middle of writing a treatise about the history of music in my log, and it takes a lot of time which I otherwise could have used for studying. Alas, here in in 2020 I have not yet listened to any Bulgarian, let alone spoken the language.