By J.J (12th Grade)

Many visitors to Bulgaria take it upon themselves to learn at least a little of the language, and knowing a few basic words and phrases can contribute wonderfully to one’s experience of the culture. Bulgarian is a Slavic language, written in the Cyrillic alphabet, which to the untrained English eye looks like someone took some Ns and Rs and flipped them around to make vowels. In my opinion, one of the first things anyone should learn to say is Ne govorya bulgarski (or Не говоря български in Cyrillic). This simply means, “I don’t speak Bulgarian,” and it’s a lifesaver in a variety of situations (for example, when the only traveler on the subway who is more lost than you somehow singles you out to ask for directions).

Perhaps putting the emphasis on how little one knows is too negative of a way to start. Other perfectly good words are zdraveyte (hello), dovizhdane (goodbye), and blagodarya (thank you). It doesn’t take much to memorize these, and you would be surprised how far they can get you. Izvinete (excuse me) and ne razbiram (I don’t understand) are also helpful, and supplement ne govorya bulgarski quite nicely if it fails to get the message across.

But in my opinion, the real joy of language learning is found a little farther on, in the really weird and obscure words. I realized how much of life I was missing out on when I was told that in Bulgaria, you can say “I turn myself to stone” with a single verb: vkamenyavam se. Equally unique is nadprikazvam, which could maybe be translated as “to out-talk,” but is really more like “to talk more than the people who talk a lot.” Meanwhile, one can use a word which translates as “Have health” to mean either “Cheers!” when toasting or “Bless you!” following a sneeze, an association I never would have made on my own.

My newest favorite Bulgarian idiom is “selling cucumbers to the cucumber seller,” and is approximately equivalent to the English phrase “you could sell ice to an Eskimo.” Coincidentally, the word for cucumber, krastavitsa, also earned a special place in my heart the day I learned that it was only one letter off from a Bulgarian word for “beauty” (as in, Beauty and the Beast, or Sleeping Beauty).

The similarities one discovers between unrelated languages are also fascinating. For example, our English “goodbye” comes from a shortening of the phrase “God be with you”; and in Bulgarian, one word for farewell, sbogom, literally means “with God.” A more common way of putting it, however, is dovizhdane, which is derrived from the words “until” and “seeing,” as in “till we see each other again.” In informal settings, however, we generally use a word some readers might recognize from a different European language: Ciao!