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"? |
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-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.
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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. |
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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. |
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... 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
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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 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!
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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 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.
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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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