LESSON NOTES

All About S1 #3
Painless Bulgarian Grammar

CONTENTS
2 Grammar

# 3
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GRAMMAR

The Focus of This Lesson is Basic Bulgarian Grammar

When learning a language, grammar usually chews you up, spits you out, and leaves you to
cry in a small corner of the room. The good news is that Bulgarian grammar is not the kind
you need to spend hours and hours memorizing. In fact, you could master the basics in less
than a week!

Bulgarian grammar is a lot simpler than you might think. For example, basic word order is so
similar to English you probably don't need to study it. We easily sum up some of the more
difficult aspects of Bulgarian grammar (like gender or subjunctives) in one word-agreement.
Everything needs to agree with or match everything else. But we'll talk about that later.

I. History of Grammar

We have studied grammar for at least four thousand years. That means there are many (too
many) terms used by grammarians that no one else understands or uses, like "paroxytone" or
"present indicative." Almost any four-year-old can speak their native language fluently without
knowing those words, so why should you have to learn them?

In these All About lessons, we are going to avoid all but the most basic grammar words.
Introducing complex grammatical concepts in the early stages of language learning actually
makes things much more difficult than they need to be.

II. Verbs

All languages have verbs and every language uses those verbs differently. The Bulgarian
verb can take up to three thousand distinctive forms. We sometimes call Bulgarian verbs
"strong" or "heavy" verbs because there is so much meaning in just one or two words. That
means less vocabulary to learn. Yea!

Time and Person

Bulgarian verbs contain two central meanings-time (also called tense) and person. "Time" (or
tense) is past, present, or future. "Person" means who is talking and who is being talked to or
about. We express these meanings by altering the verbs according to specific patterns. Time
is indicated by changing the verb to a past, present, or future form, and person is indicated by

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adding on a specific ending.

English verbs change to express time and person as well. For example, time can be
expressed as "I was happy" (past), which is different from "I am happy" (present), which is
different from "I will be happy" (future). Person can be expressed as "I am happy," which is
different from "He is happy," which is different from "We are happy."

Bulgarian verbs

Bulgarian verbs vary in person, number, voice, aspect, mood, tense, and even gender. For
example, the correct response to Shte hodish li do magazina? ("Are you going to the store?")
is Shte otida ("I will go"). Hodish is the verb hodya, originally meaning "to walk." Otida is the
verb otivam ("to go"), changed into the correct time and then to the correct person, "I." So in
this case, not only the time and person change, but the verb usage changes too, according to
the direction of the action.

III. Gender

Gender in Bulgarian denotes a particular type of agreement among words, not people. Jena
("woman") is feminine but so is masa ("table") and zemya ("earth"). Myj ("man") is masculine
but so is noj ("knife") and vestnik ("newspaper"). This may sound strange, but it is very easy to
pick up and is kind of fun to play with once you get it down.

English does this too, just not as much. For example, we don't say, "He is a stewardess,"
because "stewardess" denotes femininity and "he" indicates masculinity. Since Bulgarian
doesn't have gender-neutral forms like "flight attendant," using the correct grammatical
gender is very important.

Tables, chairs, cars, trees, socks, and food all have gender in Bulgarian. We'll go over this in
more detail in future lessons.

IV. Plural - More Than One?

Once again, agreement. We already learned that verbs need to be altered or conjugated to
the correct person. This number agreement extends to all the articles, demonstratives,
pronouns...wait! Too many grammar words! To...all the other words in the sentence. The
plural forms of the words do not express their gender as clearly as the singular ones, but may
also provide some clues to it. Details on how this is done will come in our next lessons.

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