I had my 2nd full Mongolian lesson on Friday. My tutor is pretty much throwing me into the language and having me learn the grammar as I go and making conversations. My homework is to write about my day, just us a dictionary and what I've learned and write it with the aim of her helping me correct mistakes. So her aim is very much getting me immersed and using the language pretty much from the word 'go'. My Vietnamese tutor took the approach of easing me in, but I think both work. With something like Vietnamese, that's an approach I appreciated because I found it more difficult to get started with.
I did a couple of very basic sentences from what I learned in my first week:, which were basic sentences and questions (and covering the different question words):
Тани дуртаи дуучин хен бе?
Миний дуртаи дуучин Флоор Йансен. Тэгээд би Батзориг Ваанчигийн, Девин Тоwнсенд, Ийсан болон Кондар-ол Ондар дуртай. Би Чад Кроегер дургүй.
Тани Ямар улс зочлосон бе?
би Гыерман болон Испанид зочилсон байна. Би Вьетнам, Монгол, Тува зочло хүсч байна.
We also did some past tense stuff last lesson. This lesson was about present simple tense stuff and practicing the conversation we had last lesson. And we covered some time expressions and other bit.
Би өглөө бүр арваас босдог - Every day I get up at 10am.So to get used to how the logic works, I need to think:
I every day 10am-from get up.
I Mongolian food eat
I cats like
My favourite food Mexican food is.
I yesterday Italian food ate
I like Yoda speak.
And Mongolian seems to rely on its suffixes and not just for verbs & tenses. Like with "at 10am", there's the suffix '-aas' which means 'from', so if you attach it to a country, you'd say somebody is from that country, eg:
би Англиас ирсэн - Bi Anglias irsen - I am from England
би Монголоос ирсэн - Bi Mongoloos irsen - I am from Mongolia
(with -as because there's already a vowel and -oos because of vowel harmony, but it's still the same suffix)
And then it seems, like Tuvan, it doesn't gender its pronouns: Тэр is used for he/she. Coming from Vietnamese's pronouns, it's a nice change of pace to only need to learn 1 word, though I do find Vietnamese's pronouns endearing but you not only have gender but relative age and relationship.
And I also had a Vietnamese lesson on Saturday, which was just a new conversation that was mostly natural, to the point where he'd go to ask a follow up question, but I was like "nope, I have more to say", so I am pleased I am getting to that level where I am expanding my sentences naturally before any follow up questions are needed.
I also delved more into Tuvan pronunciation and it is challenging to change my accent completely. I've got to produce vowels from deeper in my throat and not using my nasal cavity, but the consonants are at the front of my mouth so 'g' doesn't have that hard sound at the back of my throat. I also read more of my 'Jungar Tuvan Texts' book, it was interesting to learn about language in the Uyghur region and how Tuvans there end up multi-lingual because they may find themselves needing Kazakh, Mongolian, Uyghur and Chinese to make it easier to communicate and sometimes it is better to speak one language instead of the other.