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More Tips for Learning Bulgarian
By Darina
In the previous article we gave you some tips about learning Bulgarian. But there are more things you can do to make the learning experience easier and more entertaining.
It helps if you visualize the words that you are learning. Don’t just translate them to English, but try to imagine the object or action that the word represents. If you want to learn the word for “pear”, imagine the fruit and connect it with the word in Bulgarian – круша. This video lesson can help you learn a few fruits by visualizing them.
Learn phrases rather than verbs. It is easier to remember because there is a story behind. You can even invent funny or silly sentences to help you remember the more challenging words. It’s easier to remember the phrase “Един билет, моля” (One ticket please), than the word билет on its own.
Imagining the grammar literally will help you learn it faster. Don’t try to translate grammar. For example, the Bulgarian phrase for “I miss you” is Липсваш ми which literally translates to “You are missing to me”.
Find a Bulgarian you can talk with. If you already have Bulgarian friends ask them to speak with you in their language from time to time. If you don’t have any Bulgarians to talk to go to a chat room or Facebook and meet some. Bulgarians are quite curious about foreigners and would gladly help you exercise. When you learn a new word try to use it immediately in the next sentence, if possible, in order to commit it to mind. We remember by repetition so you need to repeat the new words until you get familiar with them.
Exercise by reading news in Bulgarian (you can do it here, here and here), watching TV shows (here), reading stories (such as Little Red Riding Hood), listening to radio (here) or watching Bulgarian movies (here). Do a Bulgarian day. Cook yourself a moussaka, read the news and watch this Bulgarian comedy. Don’t worry if you don’t understand all. The immersion in the language will help you, you will realize later that you recognise words that you’ve heard in this movie or that radio program and that will make them easier to remember.
This basic sentence will help you learn a lot of new Bulgarian words. So, if you want to know how an object is called in Bulgarian, point at it and ask the nearest Bulgarian “Коя е думата за това?” (Koia e dumata za tova?|What is the word for this?).
Start learning idioms. If you translate them literally some of them sound funny and are easy to remember. For example, the idiom изплюй камъчето, literally translates to “spit out the pebble”, but is used as the English “spill the beans”. This will help you get a feeling for the language.
