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Hardcore Slavic

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58 messages over 8 pages: 1 2 3 4 57 8 Next >>
Kartof
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5067 days ago

391 posts - 550 votes 
Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 41 of 58
07 October 2013 at 5:41am | IP Logged 
tricoteuse wrote:

Bulgarian question time:

- For "I travel to cities and villages", could you say "пътувам в селовете и градовете", i.e. using a generic definite article?
- Can you say "Догодина ще дойда в три града" or must you use ходя?
- Can you say после това, or is it either "после" or "след това"?


-The plural of село is села (stress on the а) so it would be "пътувам в селата и градовете". I'm not sure what you mean by "generic definite article" as there is only one type of definite article in Bulgarian and it's used appropriately. In Bulgarian it tends to be used more than in English.
-You must use ходя in this case because ходя means go while дойда means come. "Next year I will go to three cities" makes a lot more sense than "Next year I will come to three cities"
-После means later while след means after. След това means "after that". "Later that" makes as much sense in English as much as "После това" does in Bulgarian.

Keep up the good work. :) I bought the Intensive Bulgarian book you're using to have as a reference grammar. The book is very good in explaining accurate grammar and vocabulary but the sentence samples and exercises are very rigid and sometimes even unnatural sounding. That's not to say it's not a good book, just don't get too frustrated if you think it's too strict. I found the dialog to be really funny in the fact that it unintentionally stereotypes Bulgarians in trying to provide cultural context. I'd say the books main strength is that it's especially good at explaining verbs. If you go to the lesson 11, there's a great verb paradigm chart that really handily explains the relationships between different tenses and verb stem types.
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tricoteuse
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Norway
littlang.blogspot.co
Joined 6679 days ago

745 posts - 845 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French
Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian

 
 Message 42 of 58
07 October 2013 at 10:06pm | IP Logged 
Thanks for your explanations!
That IS indeed the generic definite article, you just confirmed it. It's a linguistics
term. The definite article is used more frequently in Bulgarian notably because it *is*
the standard expression for generics, whereas in English bare plurals are.
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Kartof
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5067 days ago

391 posts - 550 votes 
Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 43 of 58
08 October 2013 at 4:20am | IP Logged 
Ah! :) Thanks, I never knew there was an underlying general explanation to when articles are used in certain languages.
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tricoteuse
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Norway
littlang.blogspot.co
Joined 6679 days ago

745 posts - 845 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French
Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian

 
 Message 44 of 58
18 October 2013 at 8:25am | IP Logged 
Well, about time for another update!

Bulgarian: Twilight got every so slightly more interesting, because they started
kissing! I know there'll never be any action, but it's better than the never ending
conversations. Also, I discovered that the awesomeness that is
Readlang now tells you what level your text is on! Such
a great site. To no one's great surprise, Twilight is estimated to be B1 intermediate.
I've added more words from Twilight to my ANKI deck, so now I have 438 cards, and I'm
on page 200 in the book. I'm on page 200 in the language history book too, hoping to
finish that one pretty soon.

I actually wrote my very first journal post in Bulgarian at
Parleremo! It may not be very pretty or very
advanced, but anyone who feels like it is free to correct it
here(there's a
correction system, like on lang-8), but you'll have to register first. Which is a good
thing, you should register!


French is pretty unrelated to anything Hardcore Slavic, but I have started writing
journal posts in it again. I also wrote a couple of posts in Russian. A couple may mean
one, I'm not sure anymore. I'm very excited about my new reading project: I'm going to
reread Robin Hobb's The Farseer Trilogy in Russian. Some of my M/M pals over at
Goodreads are reading it in December in preparation for Hobb's new series featuring the
same characters, but I may need a headstart, so I'll just try it out now. The awesome
news is that I have a Ru-Ru dictionary incorporated into my Kindle now, so reading
should be pretty smooth.
1 person has voted this message useful



sans-serif
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 4560 days ago

298 posts - 470 votes 
Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish
Studies: Danish

 
 Message 45 of 58
18 October 2013 at 10:17am | IP Logged 
tricoteuse wrote:
Also, I discovered that the awesomeness that is
Readlang now tells you what level your text is on! Such a great site. To no one's great surprise, Twilight is estimated to be B1 intermediate.

This sounds like a really neat feature. I wonder how it works, exactly. I'd love to see how it ranks some of my favorite books, ...
tricoteuse wrote:
I'm very excited about my new reading project: I'm going to
reread Robin Hobb's The Farseer Trilogy in Russian. Some of my M/M pals over at
Goodreads are reading it in December in preparation for Hobb's new series featuring the same characters, but I may need a headstart, so I'll just try it out now.

... which incidentally include a lot of fantasy. Not sure if The Farseer Trilogy makes my top10 but it might be fun to revisit in another language. Have you by chance read it in Swedish? Was the translation OK? Some of the Finnish translations I read when I was younger were in retrospect somewhat amateurish. I mean, if the language was sketchy enough to bother a 10-year-old, it must have been less than satisfactory. ;-)

Edited by sans-serif on 18 October 2013 at 10:18am

1 person has voted this message useful



tricoteuse
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Norway
littlang.blogspot.co
Joined 6679 days ago

745 posts - 845 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French
Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian

 
 Message 46 of 58
18 October 2013 at 1:19pm | IP Logged 
The Farseer Trilogy definitely makes my top ten! There's such an enormous amount of
crappy fantasy out there ;) But, I read it very long ago, when I was 14 or so, so I think
reading it again will be like reading it for the first time. I read it in English, so I
have no idea how good the Swedish is!
1 person has voted this message useful



tricoteuse
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Norway
littlang.blogspot.co
Joined 6679 days ago

745 posts - 845 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French
Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian

 
 Message 47 of 58
23 October 2013 at 7:52am | IP Logged 
The fact that I finally finished Историческа граматика на българския език merits its own
post. My review can be found
here. Very happy about that
one. Now I'm going to try to finish Twilight before I start something else. I would very
much like to read something historical, and I was thinking of finding something on
Christo Botev. I have no idea how easy it is to find Bulgarian e-books online, so I'm
also considering ordering something from the publisher where I bought Xaralampiev's book,
since that was very fast and efficient. We'll see. If anyone can recommend a good
Bulgarian online bookstore (if they accept PayPal that's brilliant), that'd also be nice.
1 person has voted this message useful



Fuenf_Katzen
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
notjustajd.wordpress
Joined 4370 days ago

337 posts - 476 votes 
Speaks: English*, German
Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans

 
 Message 48 of 58
23 October 2013 at 5:29pm | IP Logged 
Ahh now I've seen your log and I'm very interested in how you've gone about learning Ukrainian. How did you get started? I think it's going to be on my hit list for 2014.


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