Learn some simple tricks to learning Bulgarian grammar
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| INTRODUCTION |
| Yuri: Hi everyone, and welcome to the grammar portion of the BulgarianPod101.com's All About series. |
| Iva: Oh, no! Not grammar! |
| Yuri: I'm sure some of our listeners our having the same reaction right about now, but we're here to tell you there's nothing to worry about here. |
| Iva: That's right. We've made Bulgarian grammar so simple, that you'll wonder what the fuss was all about. |
| Yuri: You'll be surprised to learn that in comparison with English, Bulgarian grammar is amazingly easy. |
| Iva: Yeah, when I was learning English, grammar usually chewed me up, spit me out, and left me crying in the corner. |
| Yuri: Bulgarian grammar is not the kind you need to spend hours and hours memorizing. In fact, you could master the basics in less than a week. |
| Iva: Less than a week? Well, we'll see about that. |
| Yuri: Just trust me. It's no where near as hard as your college professor makes it seem. |
| Iva: Well, basic word order is certainly similar to English. |
| Yuri: You probably don't need to study it. |
| Iva: Some of the more difficult aspects of Bulgarian grammar like gender and subjunctives can be easily summed up. You need complicated grammar explanations to understand how it all works. Right? |
| Yuri: Wrong. Both grammar and the subjunctive can be easily summed up in one word. Aggreement. Grammatical agreement means all the pieces and parts of a sentence need to agree with or match everything else. We'll talk more about this later, because we're getting off topic. |
| Iva: Ok. |
Lesson focus |
|---|
| Yuri: So a quick grammar overview. |
| Iva: Right. Grammar has been studied for at least 4,000 years. |
| Yuri: This means that there are many, too many, terms used by grammarians that no one else understands or uses. Like paroxytone and present indicative. |
| Iva: I understand those words. |
| Yuri: Grammarian! Anyway, almost any four year old can speak their native language fluently, without knowing those words. Why should we have to learn them? |
| Iva: Good point. |
| Yuri: Grammar has its place, but in these All About lessons, we're going to avoid all but the most basic grammar words. |
| Iva: He's right. Introducing unfamiliar grammatical concepts in the early stages of language learning actually makes things much more difficult than they need to be. |
| Yuri: One basic grammatical concept is verbs. |
| Iva: Verbs indicate action like "run" or "sit." |
| Yuri: Right. All languages have verbs, which makes learning verbs an important place to start. |
| Iva: But every language uses those verbs differently, which means that they need special attention. |
| Yuri: That's right. Bulgarian verbs are sometimes called strong or heavy verbs, because there is so much meaning in just one or two words. Bulgarian verbs have much more inferred meaning than English verbs. |
| Iva: That means less vocabulary to learn! |
| Yuri: Yes! Bulgarian verbs contain two central meanings, time (also called tense) and person. |
| Iva: Time, or tense, is past, present, or future. |
| Yuri: Person means who is talking, be talked to, or talked about. |
| Iva: These meanings are expressed by altering the verbs according to specific patterns called conjugations. |
| Yuri: Yes. Conjugating verbs is a way of making the verbs agree or match what you are talking about. |
| Iva: Time is indicated by changing the verb to a past, present, or future form, and person is indicated by adding on a specific ending. |
| Yuri: English verbs change or conjugate, too. The difference is that English verbs change according to different conjugation patterns. |
| Iva: That's right. For example time can be expressed as "I was happy." |
| Yuri: Past. |
| Iva: Which is different from "I am happy." |
| Yuri: Present. |
| Iva: Which is different from "I will be happy." |
| Yuri: Future. Exactly. Person can be expressed as "I am happy," which is different from "He is happy," which is different from "We are happy." |
| Iva: Wow! We went through that pretty fast, but don't be worried about details right now. Just go for the big picture right now. |
| Iva: Right. Bulgarian verbs are conjugated according to patterns that are different than English. |
| Yuri: Bulgarian verbs vary in person, number, voice, aspect, mood, tense, and even gender. |
| Iva: For example, the correct response to “Ще ходиш ли до магазина?” |
| Yuri: Are you going to the store? |
| Iva: Is, “Ще отида.” |
| Yuri: I will go. The word “ходиш” is the verb “ходя” originally meaning "to walk." “Отида” is the verb “отивам”, "to go," changed into the correct time and then to the correct person. So in this case, not only did time and person change, but the verb usage changed, too. |
| Iva: That's right. The verb “ходя” is used instead of “отивам”. |
| Yuri: Exactly. We use different verbs according to the direction of the action. In this case, the same word also has the same meaning of "to the store." |
| Iva: So in Bulgarian, this one word, “ходя” or "to walk," can have the same meaning as "to go" or “отивам” depending on the type of action. |
| Yuri: Don't worry. We'll teach you how to interpret these verbs and their usage according to the action as our course goes on. But now, we need to talk a bit about grammatical gender. |
| Iva: Right. Agreement is also expressed in Bulgarian with gender. |
Outro |
| Yuri: Gender in Bulgarian denotes a particular type of agreement among words, not people. |
| Iva: Exactly. “жена”, woman, is feminine, but so is “маса”, table and “земя”, earth. Likewise, “мъж”, man, is masculine, but so is “нож”, knife and “вестник”, newspaper. |
| Yuri: This may sound strange but it is very easy to pick up and kind of fun to play with once you get it down. |
| Iva: English does this, too, just not as much. |
| Yuri: That's right. For example, we don't say "He's a stewardess," because "stewardess" denotes femininity, and "he" indicates masculinity. |
| Iva: And Bulgarian doesn't have gender neutral forms like "flight attendant," so using the correct grammatical gender is very important. |
| Yuri: Tables, chairs, cars, trees, socks, and food all have gender in Bulgarian. |
| Iva: Once again, don't get caught up in the details. Just go for the general concept. |
| Yuri: That's right. We'll go over this in more detail in the future lessons. |
| Iva: The last thing we are going to talk about is plurality. |
| Yuri: Once again, this is a form of agreement among words. |
| Iva: Right. We already learned that verbs need to be altered or conjugated to the correct person. |
| Yuri: Which English does, too. |
| Iva: Yes. Bulgarian extends plurality from the verbs to all the articles, demonstratives, pronouns. |
| Yuri: Wait. Too many grammar words. Let’s just say that plurality in Bulgarian is more comprehensive than in English. |
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