Nouns and Adjectives

What are Nouns and Adjectives?

Nouns are the words that name physical or abstract objects. For example, the word “shoe” is a noun. It names a physical object. An example for an abstract object is the word “love”.

Adjectives are the words that represent a quality of an object. For example, the word “old” represents a quality of the noun “shoe”.

[membership_headline]Bulgarian Nouns[/membership_headline] The Bulgarian nouns are a bit different than the English ones. The difference is this: in Bulgarian, nouns have gender. The gender can be masculine, feminine or neuter. Here are some examples of nouns with different gender:
[content_box_paper_white width=”100%”]ден (masculine)
ванилия (feminine)
утро (neuter) [/content_box_paper_white]There is a general rule that can help you define the gender of each noun. By time, you will be able to recognize it by hearing automatically. Basically, the gender of the nouns is recognized by the ending of the word.
[table id=6 /] There are, of course, some exceptions. For example, when nouns refer to a male person, they may end with a vowel. Also, there are some feminine words which do not end with the letters shown in the table. Such exceptions are нощ  (night) and вечер (evening).

[membership_headline]Adjectives[/membership_headline]

The Bulgarian adjectives agree with the gender of the nouns. This means that the ending of the adjective changes according to the gender of the noun. For example, if you want to say “nice wish” in Bulgarian, you have to know the gender of “wish” (желание) in order to form the right ending of “nice” (хубав). Let’s see the same example in Bulgarian:

[content_box_paper_white width=”100%”]Хубаво желание[/content_box_paper_white]

Here is how the adjectives change:
[table id=7 /]

Желание is neuter, because it ends on -e. Therefore, we have to end the adjective хубав with –o, forming хубаво. Now, let’s see the phrase “nice day”. The word “day” is ден in Bulgarian. According to the table above, the noun is masculine. This means that the phrase “nice day” will be:
[content_box_paper_white width=”100%”]Хубав ден[/content_box_paper_white]

There are some exceptions in that rule too. They are based on the previous exception, that not all masculine nouns end with a consonant. However, it is not needed to dig into exceptions. The rules above apply for most nouns and adjectives. The exceptions will be learned by practising later.

Note that all adjectives in the course are presented in masculine gender.

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