From Trip Planning to Language Learning and Everything in Between

I mentioned in my last post that I booked my tickets and will be leaving for staging on May 10th. The following day, I'll be taking a bus to New York and catching a plane to Munich. There I have a 5 hour layover followed by another plane ride to Sofia. The journey does not end in the capital city, however. I will need to catch a bus, to a resort town 2 hours away from Sophia. All in all, the trip should take approximately 24 hours. Believe it or not, but I'm actually looking forward to it (even though I know from past experiences, by the time we land in Sofia, I and many other volunteers will be sleep deprived and brain dead.)


This week I also received about 100 pages of information from Peace Corps Bulgaria. The information ranges from past volunteer experiences and Bulgarian Culture, to the different types of ways to a few TEFL theories. I must admit I was not too excited reading the latter. In fact, I still have yet to finish the remaining 40 pages.

The information Peace Corps sent also had a "Learn Bulgarian Section", something I was really looking forward to reading.

           The Good News:

Bulgarian is regarded as a Slavic language, similar to Russian, my native tongue. The Bulgarian alphabet consists of 30 Cyrillic letters as opposed to the 32 Cyrillic letters in the Russian alphabet and 28 in the English Alphabet. Luckily, my experience with the Russian alphabet makes it really easy to read most of the words. Also, and this is the best part, there are actually a few words that are very similar to the Russian ones.

As of today, I know the key words in Bulgarian (hello, thank you, goodbye, please, how are you, I am good, family members etc.) I also know how to order a few things in the restaurant, and buy tomatoes, cucumbers and peaches in a store. (I bought a cd, and these were the first few lesson plans.)

Why tomatoes, peaches, and cucumbers? I still have yet to find out. 

Also, since the numerical system is very close to the Russian one, I have that down as well. I posted some examples below so I would not be the only one learning the words.

                                                                                


            The Bad News:

During my brief optimism of knowing the language, I decided to go online and watch Bulgarian News (in Bulgarian of coarse).  Although I understood 1 in 10 words the reporters were saying, if you think I understood the "gist" of the report… you, my friends, are mistaken.

Although we have the same alphabet not all words are similar to the Russian. A lot of the words in the Bulgarian alphabet have their roots from Greek, Latin, and Turkish languages.So no one language really helps you learn Bulgarian.

 
All in all, this means I have a long long way to go in becoming fluent in a country that I will make my home for the next two years.