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Teaching Bulgarian to English-speaking Learners
R. Alexander Berkeley, California, USA |
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(Presentation of R. Alexander, Intensive Bulgarian, a Textbook and Reference Grammar, 2 volumes, University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) Teaching Bulgarian to English-speaking learners presents special problems. It is true that the two languages have several structural similarities, making Bulgarian more accessible to English speakers than other Slavic languages. Like English, Bulgarian expresses syntactic relations by prepositional phrases instead of case making, and definiteness by means of an article; like English, it also has a complex system of verbal tenses. However even the fact of these significant similarities is misleading, as actual usage in Bulgarian usually is sufficiently different from English that direct translation will lead to errors and misunderstandings in many cases. There are also numerous facts of Bulgarian structure that are difficult for speakers of English. These include the making of grammatical gender on all nominal forms, the necessity of grammatical agreement between noun, adjective and article, the making of person and number on all simplex verbal tenses and of number and gender on all compound tenses, the existence of long and short form pronoun objects, the rigid word-order requirements concerning clitics, the many different usages of the small particle „se", and of course, the existence of verbal aspect and the renarrated mood. The principle underlying the writing of my textbook Intensive Bulgarian, a Textbook and Reference Grammar, is that Bulgarian grammar is best presented to English-speaking learners by means of precise and thorough grammatical explanations presented in contrastive terms when possible, and accompanied by copious examples. I have written all the grammatical explanations because I believe that a linguist whose native language is English best understands the problems English speaking learners will encounter. I have worked in collaboration with a linguist whose native language is Bulgarian, Olga M. Mladenova, who has composed examples, exercises and readings and checked all explanations for accuracy. An additional feature of Intensive Bulgarian is that it is addressed simultaneously to the two different groups of students usually encountered in university settings: those who know no linguistics and no other foreign language, and those who are specialists in linguistics, or Slavic studies, or both. Lessons are split into „Basic Grammar" (intended for the first group) and „Additional Grammar Notes" (intended as a supplement for the second group). The book has been very well received in the American press. The only criticism has been that not enough exercises are included. Anticipating this criticism, I nevertheless chose consciously to use the available space to make the grammar explanations thorough and inclusive. Self-study students need this more than exercises, and teachers working in a classroom will know better the needs of their specific students and will better be able to create their own exercises to address these needs directly.
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