Product Description

Easy to use and specially written by experienced teachers for self-study or class use, this course offers a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Bulgarian.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1000155 in Books
• Published on: 1994-06-23
• Original language: Bulgarian, English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Customer Reviews

A great way to learn Bulgarian, simply fantastic!
As an almost complete beginner to Bulgarian this book soon got me reading the slav alphabet. It's a very pratical book, explaining every aspect to speaking and writing.

Within hours I could pronounce every written Bulgarian word, and it wasn't long before I was starting to understand their meanings.

Great book, I'm looking forward to reciving the cassette shortly.

Initially confusing, still persevering...
I made the mistake of initally buying the book only. However, just a few pages in it becomes clear that the cassettes aren't really optional - they're essential to get the most from this book. Many of the exercises refer directly to the cassettes (even though the book omits to tell you this). I was very confused trying to work out the answers to exercises until it occured to me that the questions referred to spoken passages on the cassettes (which at the time I did not have!).

After buying the cassettes separately I became increasingly confused...

The book uses a 'cassette' icon where ever there is supposed to be relevant audio on the cassette. Unfortunately, it is not consistent. Frequently the icon is missing where there is audio and at other times the audio does not match what is printed in the book. It makes it very hard to follow from book to cassette. I ended up using a highlighting pen to mark the words that do appear on the cassettes.

A Bulgarian friend spotted many other inconsistencies and plain errors in the book and audio, which she was able to correct in the book. If it had not been for her I would've had an even more confusing time.

The book also seems to miss out essential information. In the first chapter it starts asking for answers to questions it hasn't yet taught you how to answer! Even my Bulgarian friend found it confusing!

However, I did learn to read Cyrillic very quickly. After that progress slowed down. I haven't tried learning a language since 'O' Level French more than 17 years ago so I needed a quick refresher on a lot of language terms that are used throughout the book (such as conjunctions, imperative, passive voice, indefinate tenses, past imperfective active participle(!)).

I'm finding it very slow going. Maybe this books teaching methods don't suit my ways of learning, or maybe I'm just not very good at languages. I've ordered another book/cassette combination from Amazon (Bulgarian - Teach Yourself Languages, Michael Holman) to see if I have better luck with that.

However, I'm going to persevere with this book and see if it gets clearer as I continue.

Sloppy pronunciation section.
I have only worked through the pronunciation section of this older version of Colloquial Bulgarian and the rest might be very good (seems thorough), but it was immediately obvious there were errors in the learning the alphabet and pronunciation section. It says that some consonants are pronounced differently when at the end of the word, then fails to tell you how to pronounce it for all the consonants mentioned. Also, the letter 'sht' is given in error instead of 'sh', when explaining an aspect of pronunciation. You shouldn't have to see errors like this when you've just learnt a new and confusing alphabet. Aside from the carelessness, the beginning section also seems a bit unnecessarily long-winded in comparison with other colloquial and teach yourself books.