Is Bulgarian Hard To Learn? (Revealed!)

Bulgarian is considered a very difficult language for English speakers to learn. It is very different to English and has a great deal of complex cases and grammatical rules. Learning it is going to take a lot of time and commitment. It also uses the Cyrillic alphabet, presenting an added difficulty in learning it.

So, if you want to learn Bulgarian, you are certainly going to have something of a struggle on your hands.

That said, it’s an immensely rewarding experience that you will benefit from in many ways.

But the reward is certainly proportional to the work it will take to learn it.

Be prepared for a long journey!

Let’s find out more.

How difficult is Bulgarian to learn?

To put it simply, Bulgarian is among the most difficult languages for an English speaker to learn.

It is very far removed from English in terms of the language groups it belongs to, and this can be one of the simplest and yet most helpful ways to contextualize languages and how difficult they will be for you to learn. English, first of all, is a Germanic language.

This puts it in the same category as German, Dutch, Norwegian, and other neighboring languages.

Bulgarian, on the other hand, is a South Slavic language, specifically an Eastern South Slavic language.

Both Germanic and Slavic languages are part of the wider Indo-European family, so English and Bulgarian are perhaps more closely related than, say, English and Japanese.

However, this is small comfort as Bulgarian is still notoriously difficult in many of its own ways despite this tenuous relationship to English.

The Slavic languages are very different from most of the rest of the European languages.

They are synthetic, and use affixes, both suffix and prefix, to express grammatical meaning. Vowel and consonant alternations are common.

Bulgarian and all Slavic languages have three grammatical genders, as well as perfect and imperfect aspects of every verb.

To put it simply, Bulgarian is going to feel all but entirely alien to you as a new starter learning the language.

All languages are difficult to learn, and even the most closely related languages to English, like Dutch, will present a challenge.

When you’ve got one as different as Bulgarian, it’s going to be a lot harder.

That said, learning Bulgarian is still well worth it and the reward, as mentioned, is more than proportional to the effort.

How long will that effort take?

How long will it take to learn Bulgarian?

Learning a language generally has two basic parts which will both take varying lengths of time. Let’s first look at the initial study period and how long you can expect to be in a classroom before you’ve got a good grip on the language.

The FSI is an institution which ranks and categorizes languages based on how much difficulty an English speaker will have in learning them.

There are five categories and Bulgarian is a category three language, meaning that it is among the more difficult languages to learn—but not the most difficult.

By this metric, then, Bulgarian will usually take around 1100 of study, or around 44 weeks, before you are at the point that you’re able to conduct yourself in the language and speak with proficiency.

This is a long time, then, to spend studying any one thing, but still considerably less time than you would spend to learn a language like Mandarin or Japanese.

But once you’ve finished this initial period of study, the learning process is not over. Ideally, you will continue going to classes to further cement your knowledge, but more importantly, you will be able to go to the country and immerse yourself in the language, speaking it every day.

This is the best way to get to the level of fluency.

With this in mind, the whole process should take anywhere from three to five years.

What is the hardest part of learning Bulgarian?

Most agree that, after having learned Bulgarian, the hardest part in retrospect to get to grips with was the pronunciation.

Slavic pronunciation in general can be very difficult for English speakers and Bulgarian is no different.

You will have to learn the pronunciation more or less from the ground up.

Learning a new alphabet is always a challenge, too.

Is Bulgarian harder than Russian?

Most agree that Bulgarian is quite a bit simpler than Russian at least in terms of its grammar, and thus is the easier language to learn.

However, there’s really not a great deal of difference in it.

Both are very difficult to learn and indeed there is a level of mutual intelligibility there so that, once you’d learned Bulgarian, you’d find Russian much easier and vice versa.

However, Bulgarian is quite a lot simpler in a few ways, but not in any particular huge way. You’ll have a challenge on your hands to learn either language, and neither is going to be a breeze.

So, again, you can’t go into learning Bulgarian expecting an easy time of it.

You’ve got many months of study ahead of you, and even then you’re only starting out on your journey.

It will take years to master the language and Bulgarian is among the hardest languages for an English speaker.

At the same time, you’ll feel the enormous benefits of being able to speak this language, and it will be a big leg up for you in a great many ways.

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