Learn how to ask "What?"
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| Здрасти, аз съм Ива. Hi everybody! I’m Iva. |
| Welcome to BulgarianPod101.com’s “Български в три минути”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Bulgarian. |
| In the last lesson, we learned how to use the verb идвам and other similar verbs that are used to describe movement. |
| We will now jump into our lessons dedicated to question words in Bulgarian. Our first one is the most commonly used question word, "What." You’ll see that there are many ways to use it in Bulgarian. |
| So imagine you want to ask your friend what he’s doing. How will you do it? |
| You will ask – Какво правиш? |
| [slowly] Какво правиш? |
| So let’s break down this answer. |
| Какво is the Bulgarian way to say "What". |
| And правиш is the 2nd person form of the verb правя, which we already studied. |
| So, altogether it is Какво правиш? This means “What are you doing?” |
| If you want to sound more formal, you can say Какво правите? That is the formal form for "What are you doing?" |
| Here the verb правя is in the 2nd person plural form, правите, which is the formal way to say "you do." |
| You can use it if you are talking to an older or superior person in a work context. |
| Here is a simple rule: each time you want to ask a question starting with "What", you have to be careful about what follows the question word. If it’s a verb, we simply use какво as, meaning “what”. |
| But if we have a noun following the question word, we have to change the question word to match the gender of the noun. So if you have a question like “What is your favorite car brand?” in Bulgarian it will sound like this - Каква е любимата ти марка коли? [slowly] Каква е любимата ти марка коли? |
| Here the question is informal because we use the 2nd person singular of the pronoun for “you”, ти. |
| What else do we have? The question word какво, which was in neuter, now has changed to каква, the feminine for “what”. This happens because the for word “car”, кола, is in feminine too. |
| So altogether we have каква meaning “what”; then е which is the verb “to be” in the 2nd person singular - we have talked about this verb in a previous lesson. |
| Then we have любимата which is an adjective meaning “favorite”, again in feminine. Then ти or “you”, “your”. Марка is the Bulgarian word for “brand”, again in feminine. |
| And finally we have кола, meaning “car” in plural, коли. |
| Каква е любимата ти марка коли? |
| Literally, “what is your favorite cars’ brand?” |
| Now let’s see how this question word какво will change if we attach it to a noun in masculine. |
| Какъв ден е днес? This means “What day is today?” [slowly] Какъв ден е днес? |
| You can ask this question when wondering if it is Tuesday or Wednesday, and so on. |
| Again, какъв is in masculine because the word “day”, ден, is in masculine too. |
| Now it’s time for Iva’s Insights. |
| Sometimes in everyday conversation, Bulgarian people use the word Какво? when they want you to repeat something they didn’t hear well. There are more formal ways to do that but just remember this in case you hear it. |
| In this lesson, we learned how to translate the word "What" depending on the grammatical situation. |
| If you remember the simple rule that words should match their gender, I’m sure you will be able to master asking questions in Bulgarian. |
| In the next lesson, we will talk about the Bulgarian for the interrogative word "Where". |
| Do you know it already? I can promise it’s easier than "what"! |
| I’ll be waiting for you in the next Български в три минути. |
| До скоро! |
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