Zapoviadete (заповядайте)

For foreigners, it can feel very rude and disdainful to hand over money or put cash down on a table without saying anything in acknowledgement. The natural way to cover this is to say ‘thank you’ as you’re doing it - blagodaria or the more easily pronounced merci. This leads to difficulties if you’re expecting to receive change, however, as saying thank you is a signal that the transaction is now finished and you’re including the additional money as a tip. Zapoviadete is a replacement courtesy word to use instead of thank you and translates as something like ‘here you go’.

Tarikat (тарикат)

The literal translation is ‘swindler’, but it’s a bit more than that. The nearest English equivalent might be ‘player’ or ‘geezer’. A tarikat is someone who will use shortcuts, loopholes, lies, tricks or cons to get what they want - usually money. It’s often used as a term of address between teenage boys as they’re the ones most likely to want the cash but not the work it would take to earn it. The paradox is that those who aspire to be a tarikat are the ones who are least likely to have the quick-thinking or intelligence to actually achieve it.

Spokoino (спокойно)

An instruction: ‘calm down’ or ‘relax’ or ‘take it easy’. I’m a teacher so I tend to use this a lot – it can also be shortened into slang: spoko, which is generally good for an easy laugh in the classroom, much like k’vo? I’m sure that the amusement here, however, comes from my pronunciation which I know isn’t quite right. This is due to my system of learning vocabulary which is almost entirely based on word association. As an example, for this word, I imagine a cockney Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise shouting: ‘Spock! Oi! No!’

Golyam praz (голям праз)

Like all countries, Bulgaria has its fair share of bizarre idioms with obscure origins. Among the most common are: Na baba ti hvurchiloto (на баба ти хвърчилото) ‘your grandmother’s kite’ which is used to say you don’t believe something (the equivalent of saying ‘you’re talking nonsense’) and Ya kamilata, ya kamilarya (я камилата, я камиларя) ‘either the camel, or the camel rider’ meaning one of several things is going to happen and it doesn’t matter which. Golyam praz is a nice one and is easy to remember – it means: ‘So what? No big deal’ and literally translates as ‘big leek.’

Anglichanin (англичанин)

‘English’ as in the nationality. The word for English as the language is different: Angliski (Английски) but both words come from 'England' which is Anglia (англия) – Great Britain is Velikobritania (Великобритания). Anglichanin is useful as a get out for when people come up to you on the street and start asking you for something – or when your limited vocabulary lets you down and you have to back out of a conversation. Technically, it should be: Az sum anglichanin (Аз съм англичанин) ‘I am English’ but I find that you can replace the ‘I am’ with an apologetic little shrug instead.

Uzhas (ужас)

In English, we have any number of ways of saying something is ‘very bad’: terrible, horrible, dreadful, horrific, horrendous, disgusting, beastly – everyone has their own preferred adjective and each of them has a slightly different connotation depending on the specific form and level of awfulness that it’s referring to. In Bulgarian, you just have uzhas. Perhaps Bulgarians simply don’t need all those variations because everything here is so good? That said, you do hear the word uzhas a lot. In fact, if you didn’t know any other words in Bulgarian, you could probably get by with just dobre and uzhas.

Dobre (добре)

Broadly: ‘good’. It’s the root of dober den (adjusted for gender, obviously) and you can say mnogo dobre if you want to be a bit more emphatic. Depending on intonation, it also covers a multitude of other applications, including ‘alright’, ‘I get it’, and many different forms of ‘OK’. It’s the word that stands out to you most when you first arrive, mainly because it’s used so much and often in isolation which makes it easy to pick out of general conversation. Much like k’vo?, dobre is handy to have in your vocabulary to show that you’re making an effort.

Shlokavitsa (шльокавица)

The spelling of Bulgarian words using the Latin alphabet – the headers of these posts are shlokavitsa. It’s necessary because the internet, most software systems and some keyboards, don’t have Cyrillic letters. There’s no universal spelling in shlokavitsa, words are written phonetically so there are some inconsistencies in sounds that don’t have direct equivalents. Ж, for example, is like the French j so sometimes it'll be written as j and sometimes as zh. When you enter the village Живково, the sign says Jivkovo, but the sign as you leave - which is on the opposite side of the road – says Zhivkovo.

Da & Ne (дa & не)

‘Yes’ and ‘no’. Pretty straightforward – unless you’re in Greece where ne means yes and there’s the more familiar head shaking action. There’s also da be da (дa бе дa) which essentially means ‘no’ – the rough equivalent of: ‘yeah, right’. You can often tag ne on the front of something to mean the opposite, like ne znam (не знам) for ‘I don’t know’ or neobiknoven (необикновен) for ‘extraordinary’. This means it’s very functional for getting by. If you know one word such as toplo (топло) which means ‘warm’, but don’t know ‘cold’, you can make yourself understood by saying: ne toplo.

Podobno (подобно)

This is one of those really useful survival words. The literal translation is ‘similar’ but it can also be ‘same to you’. This means that – with a certain amount of foreigner’s blur - you can use it as a response in a variety of situations. At Easter, for example, it’s common to say Hristos voskrese (Христос воскресе) which means ‘Christ is risen’. You’re meant to reply with voistina voskrese (воистина воскресе) ‘truly, he is risen’, but I feign ignorance and go with podobno instead. Watch out for serving staff saying ‘enjoy your meal’ though (I’ve made this mistake several times).

Dovizhdane (Довиждане)

‘Goodbye’. Less formal is chao (чао) which is like ‘bye’ and obviously comes from Italian as merci comes from French. Chao works on its own, but at the end of a conversation, you’d say haida chao (хайда чао) which is like ’alright then, bye’. The response from the other person is usually different. If you say chao, they’ll say chao chao, and visa versa. Lek den (лек ден) is nice as it means something like ‘have an easy day’ or, if it’s the evening (which is feminine), it’s: Leka vecher (лека вечер). Again, the response is adjusted to just leka.

Dober den (добър дeн)

This is ‘good day’. Dober is ‘good’, den is’ ‘day’. There doesn’t seem to be a common greeting for the afternoon, but you can say dobra vecher (добра вечер) for ‘good evening’ and dobro outro (добро утро) for ‘good morning’. The ‘good’ part changes because of the gender: day is masculine, evening is feminine and morning is neutral. If you want to be less formal (and avoid getting confused by the whole gender palaver) the rough equivalent of ‘hello’ is zdraveite (здравейте) – or just zdravei if you know the person really well – and zdrasti (здрасти) is the equivalent of ‘hi’. 

Mozhe li (може ли)

This means ‘may I have’ and is what you use when you’d like to buy something so it’s invaluable. It’s also nice and polite, not as blunt as iskam (искам) which is ‘I want’. You just have to say mozhe li followed by whatever it is that you’re requesting (you’ll have to sort the article/gender out though – or you could just point), tag a mola (моля) on the end as a thank you and you’ve got a sentence going. You just need to hope that the shopkeeper isn’t wowed enough by your amazing fluency to try and start a conversation.

Zashto? (защо?)

‘Why?’ You can shorten it to the more slang ‘shto? in the same way as kakvo? turns into k’vo? There’s a logical simplicity to the answer you give as there’s no separate word for ‘because’. Instead, you add a definite article to the end so it becomes zashtoto (защото) which I suppose is the equivalent of: ‘the why’. Definite articles are always added to the ends of words and they’re different depending on gender. There will also be three other endings for each gender’s plural and three more depending on whether the plural is a specific number or just mnogo.

Mnogo (много)

Not everything in Bulgarian is hideously complicated, some elements of the language are simpler. For example, once you can read the Cyrillic alphabet, you can have a halfway decent stab at pronunciation as the letters are all phonetic. There isn’t anything that’s really confusing like ‘through’, thought’, and ‘tough’ in English – or ‘Pacific Ocean’ that has three C’s, all pronounced differently. Neither does there seem to be countless ways of expressing large quantities that change depending on the context (‘much’, ‘many’, ‘lots of’, ‘very’ etc.). As far as I‘m aware, you can get by with saying mnogo in every situation.

Edno (едно)

This is the number ‘one’ but, because it’s Bulgarian, it’s not as simple as that. There are different ways of saying ‘one’ depending on the gender of whatever it is that you’re referring to. Everything has a gender here – nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs – and there are three of them: masculine, feminine and neutral. Edno is the neutral version, edin (един) is masculine and edna (една) is feminine. There’s no equivalent of ‘a’ in Bulgarian so ‘one’ is used as an article. This is probably the most common error for English learners and even the most advanced students sometimes slip up.

K’vo? (к’во?)

This is a shortened version of kakvo (какво) which means ‘what’ and is generally used as a way of saying ‘pardon’. In terms of slang, k’vo? is one step further on from that - the equivalent of saying ‘wha?’ to someone. It’s practically the only thing I can say with an authentic sounding accent and, because it’s so colloquial, it’s pretty much guaranteed to get an easy laugh from native Bulgarians when someone says something I don’t understand. I once forgot myself on a plane and said it to a posh elderly woman which didn’t go down quite so well.

Blagodaria (благодаря)

‘Thank you’. You can usually get away with merci but that’s pretty informal and obviously not properly Bulgarian. Thank you is always the first thing I try and pick up in any language but this word is hard for English ears on first hearing – it sounds like the speaker has a mouth full of cotton wool. They compress the vowels, the R tumbles and there’s the Bulgarian L pronounced as W thing. It sounds like: ‘bwogurderea’ but spoken very fast, almost as if it’s one syllable. Even after four years, I’m still not entirely sure that I’m saying it right.