IH Sofia

  Let’s say you are a Bulgarian who is fluent in English, taking part in a psychological test. With an electroencephalogram attached to your head, you  look at a list of pairs of English words. Your instructions are to indicate which word pairs that are ” related in meaning.” For example, “Child:Kid” has a relationship [...]

Okay, we’ve talked about the Bulgarian terms for family members both of blood relation and marriage. I’m sure you agree that was complicated enough. But we still have one more aspect of family to discuss, which is what terms you use to talk to each other. When you listen to Bulgarian, you might hear these [...]

Last week, we talked about blood relatives, so you should have a handle on basic Bulgarian family terminology. Now it’s time to talk about something a little more complicated, the in-laws.In English, all of these people are named some version of X-in-law, but in Bulgarian, they almost all have unique names. And those names change [...]

Greetings, everyone. You are about to embark on an (at least) two-blog-entry journey of exploration into the ins and outs of the Bulgarian family.  I’m going to warn you know, Bulgarian family terminology is not simple. Things change depending on whom you marry, how old you are, and your gender, and it isn’t made any [...]

A big barrier to language learning (at least for me, I don’t know about you guys), is the fear that when I make mistakes in my non-native language, people will think that I’m stupid. After all, people judge each other based on how well they speak their native language all the time, and people who [...]

The standard system for transliterating Bulgarian Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet is stupid and should be shot in the face. Here are some HORRIBLE MISLEADING GLUPOSTI you will see in the standard system. a  for ъ, which is not pronounced as in either fAther or bAd, but as in bOOk (more or less). uh is [...]

Hey, pich! Do you want your speech to be more yak, with chudesni words that will kef your drugi? Well, stiga searching beh! You’re a kysmetliv kopele, because the Bulgarian language has  all the strashni words you might want. Hem nouns, hem verbs, which sa I’m going to cherpya you. Are you gotov? Adjectives (note [...]

Language acquisition is based on skill, not knowledge. Although a learner may have a very good grasp of the rules of grammar and a large vocabulary, they may not be able to correctly formulate a spoken sentence when called upon to do so. Language fluency depends upon the acquisition of habits, or “automatization,” in which [...]

Learning Bulgarian and English,  it soon becomes obvious that each language makes a lot of grammatical distinctions that the other one doesn’t. English present continuous versus present simple, Bulgarian direct verses indirect object pronouns, and many others. Sometimes it gets so bad that I suspect my Bulgarian friends and teachers are making up new grammar [...]

Culture in the classroom.   You’d think that a classroom would be free of cultural misunderstandings. Yes, eating, drinking, driving, and getting married are all different in different countries, but school? There is a teacher. There are students. There are books. What, do I have to draw you a diagram. And yet, I’ve encountered some [...]

Culture is important because expectations are important. We need to make sure what the S sees matches their expectations. (either by adjusting what they see or by adjusting their expectations). Whether a S can accept an alien idea (or at least not be offended by it) or not depends a lot on their ego permeability [...]

I’ve taught lots of different people. Every student has their own motivations, needs, and preferences, but over time, I have noticed a few patterns. Which one of these is true for you? 1.   You want grammar! Maybe you think that if you understand grammar, you you’ll be able to speak the language (you’re wrong. Sorry). Maybe you [...]

What is the role of a language teacher? I have noticed that one of the things that separates the good language teachers from bad is their answer to this question. Many people, remembering the teachers they had in history or math or science classes, think that a language teacher should be a source of knowledge. [...]

Motivation is the most important part of learning a language, or indeed, of doing anything difficult.  But what, specifically, are our motivations for learning foreign languages, and how can we use them to learn language more effectively? Following the work of B.F. Skinner and Albert Bandura, we know that rewards or incentives motivate us to do unpleasant things (like [...]

All new mouseover language feature! Hover your mouse over the Bulgarian words to get a transliteration and translation! It’s November, and with winter around the corner, the Macedonian дядовци are getting ready for the winter. How, you ask? Why, by making вино of course! Every къща in every село has an асма, or grape trellis. [...]