Learning Cyrillic (Живот Кирилица)

With all of the free time I have on my hands and because I would hate to live here three months and miss out on the opportunity, I am determined to learn to speak some Bulgarian. My first approach was to learn and master a new phrase every day. By the end of my first week in Bulgaria, I could say "good day", "thank you", "hello", "good evening", "have a nice day", "see ya soon!", etc.

During week two I realized that knowing these phrases is fine, but it only gets you so far. It doesn't help you read a menu and while pointing to a menu item and hoping for the best can be fun and suspenseful, I want to have at least some idea of what I'm eating.

So I buckled down today and decided to learn the alphabet. I found a few websites and youtube videos that went over the basics: the letters, sound pronunciations, and examples. I wrote the whole alphabet down the little notebook I take with me everywhere and all day I studied, practiced, and quizzed myself. While laying at the beach I closed my eyes and visualized all of the letters I could remember.

Later in the day, Brock got a hankering for a kebab at a street-side stand and while waiting for it I perused the menu and was stunned that I recognized the word falafel in cyrillic! I pointed at it and excitedly shouted "FALAFEL!!" Of course this led to a bit of confusion with the guy making the kebab who now thought I was placing another order.

We walked over to a restaurant with a patio on one of the main squares to have a drink. The waitress brought us menus in Bulgarian. Usually they bring the English versions once they realize we aren't from here. I started proving to Brock how my new alphabet skills would help me figure out the menu items. My first drink was a chai tea, mainly because I was thrilled to be able to read the word. After seeing what she must have thought was us struggling with the menu when in fact I was studying the menu, the waitress brought us an English one. So Brock used the English menu to quiz me on the components of pizzas, pasta dishes, and salads from the Bulgarian menu and I realized that just simply being able to sound out the word in cyrillic can lead one to figure out the word since there are a lot of words from English and French as well as those from many other languages in Bulgarian. This is the same reason an anglophone can generally muddle through French, Spanish, and Italian, picking up a few things here and there in print because the alphabets are so similar, as are many words. Now I may not always know what I'm reading, but at least now I can take a stab at the pronunciation and then I'll learn new words along the way. I can't stop reading everything I see now. I realized that the hair salon below my apartment also does pedicures! Very useful knowledge of course.

It must have been pretty entertaining for anyone within earshot to have heard my attempts to sound out these words, especially the ones I ended up knowing. It may have sounded something like this: "B... B... AHHH, Nnnn AH... N? BANANA!!! K- Koh- Kohnnn -ya. K. COGNAC!" I relayed this experience to my sister who said it sounds an awful lot like her witnessing her three year old son learning to read.

I was proud to go back to O'Neill's to tell Nikola to bring me the Bulgarian menu, because I can read! Sort of.