The importance of local language in Bulgaria

People like foreigners that try.

I feel it's essential for expats to learn some Bulgarian. Though in many situations like grocery shopping one can get by fine with a bare minimum, we chose to live in someone else's country and it's important to respect that.

In cities and more touristy areas, many young people will speak some English, Russian, or German. In villages where it's mostly older folk, the only people who speak English will be the kids. I've spoken to several 10 and 12 year olds are near fluent, and even had someone in the mayor's office fetch their 10 year old son to translate!

Google Translate does help, but when using it to chat with my lovely Bulgarian neighbour, she often says things that translate as quite weird, so I'm sure I say "weird" things back just as often.

The best way I've learned, rather than doing a course, is by repeating back what my neighbours says and what Google Translate says. Also, Cyrillic isn't nearly as hard to learn as it looks! It helps a lot to be able to read signs, bus destinations, etc!

Agreed, although like in the UK each area has distinct dialects. My wife speaks conversational Bulgarian having lived here on and off for 17 years, but I have only been living here full time for a year and only speak the bare minimum.

She is very good with me when we are out making me read words, like shop signs, that way I begin to recognise letters and translate longer words, the difficulty I have is between higher and lower case as our brains are programmed to the English alphabet, like В is V and b is B said phonetically. So yes you're right the Bulgarian alphabet is key.

Hello everyone,

I sincerely appreciate everyone's valuable contributions to this conversation.

Thank you all for your input.

we chose to live in someone else's country and it's important to respect that.

That is very well said janemulberry

Cheers,

Cheryl