Здравей!

I’m Gareth and here you will find my blog about learning Bulgarian. I started studying it a couple of years ago, mostly from a book, but I recently got a teacher and have seen my skills improve drastically. I want to use this blog to document my journey to fluency, sharing the challenges, my reflections on the language, and my lesson notes, which I hope will be helpful.

Bulgarian isn’t an easy language to learn. That’s not because it requires a four digit IQ (although that would certainly help!), but because learning resources are in short supply. When I learned Spanish, there were books, websites, YouTube videos, easy access to TV shows and music. But that’s just not the case with Bulgarian. I was surprised to find very few self-study books aimed at English speakers and they largely avoided the kind of grammatical explanations necessary for learning a language properly.

I’d like to contribute to the few resources that exist by sharing the materials I make for myself. As a former English teacher and translator (from Spanish), I know how to learn a language. I plan to use my experience creating learning resources and courses in English to structure the content of this blog in a way that will help me master the language and also hopefully help you too. I’ll also pepper this with some general language-learning tips that I picked up when studying Spanish. As I’m clearly far from a Bulgarian expert, each post is checked by a native Bulgarian speaker to ensure I’m not peddling misinformation.

My posts assume a basic level of Bulgarian, such as the ability to read the Cyrillic script (even if you have no idea what any of it means!). If you’re studying Bulgarian yourself, it would be great to hear from you. Leave a comment on one of my posts or get in touch.

Gareth