(no subject)

[ysobel]

My Cyrillic is ... er, extant. Given enough time, I can sound out any word or words given to me in Cyrillic; my pronunciation may be weird and stress will probably be wrong and native speakers of the relevant language would laugh their head off, but I can do it.

My Cyrillic handwriting? Sucks beyond the telling of it.

The thing is, printed Cyrillic and written Cyrillic have some letters that look different. And a lot of the differences happen to coincide with cursivey English letters that represent different sounds. So, for example, take the following examples:

Европа (Evropa) looks, in handwriting, like Ebpona

пират (pirat) looks, ditto, like nupam

диета (dieta) looks, ditto, like guema

д/g and т/m trip me up a lot. и/u slightly less so, in that I know the relationship between the two, I'm just way too used to u being /oo/ and not /ee/. в/b I usually catch fairly quickly. The whole п/p/р/r thing ... *flail*

Luckily, the lessons, at least at first, are printed, and /most/ of my conversion problems come trying to read handwritten Cyrillic, not write it. But still.

(And yes, this does mean that I settled on Bulgarian for my not-a-school. It's a ridiculous choice and has absolutely no significance for anything, and German would make a hell of a lot more sense, but whatever.)

Comments

[lireavue]

So, I realize you have no idea who I am (that network button goes new and interesting places!), but I saw this and thought it would be worth asking if I should point my Bulgarian friend in your direction. She, I, and a couple other friends have been doing stuff not... dissimilar, but not the same as, your not a school over in courtesan_school for awhile now, and we've all found that having a native or near-native to help with language study is extremely useful. (Most public entries are on the DW version of the comm; we've recently had to lock down the LJ comm of the same name due to, uh, some very fun parental issues. Not.)

If not, that's fine, but I figured it was worth asking! The worst you can tell me is that I'm a crazy person, and I already knew that. >.>

[ysobel]

Ooh, yes please :D That would be awesome.

(I sing in Bulgarian, but, er, memorized song lyrics != native speaker help.)

[lireavue]

Okay! I will send her over to this post when she wakes up, which should be... soon? Probably, anyway.

(If you wanted to poke at Russian or German at any point, she's fluent enough in Russian to help my other friend correct hers. Other friend also is teaching herself German, though has no native speaker to help there. Me, I had French and I'm working on Spanish, after which I will start poking at non-Romance. :D)

[pne]

Did you find information about cursive Bulgarian Cyrillic?

I ask mostly because I know that cursive Serbian Cyrillic and cursive Russian Cyrillic are not the same (for example, cursive Serbian п looks like a ŭ rather than like a n), and I don't know anything about cursive Bulgarian Cyrillic but wouldn't be surprised if it's not exactly the same as cursive Russian Cyrillic.

And since for many people, Cyrillic = Russian, I wonder whether you found information on cursive Russian Cyrillic or cursive Bulgarian Cyrillic.

[kikibug13]

*is lireavue's friend here*

Trust me, the transition from Bulgarian to English was no less trippy. But the more you read, the easier it gets? Unless you run into words that can be read in both scripts, and then it's fun. bum, ferex. >.>

[pauamma]

*looks at userpic* You're an airport?

[ysobel]

This was Bulgarian Cyrillic. Which, yeah, there are some differences to Russian handwritten (lowercase /z/ in particular) but it's surprisingly close. Which is, I sup[pose, lucky for me...

[pne]

Ah, OK!

[ysobel]

http://bunny-comic.com/1160.html :D

[pauamma]

*ist erleuchtet* (which might mean "is lit up/set on fire" for all I know - but that would make the point better, so I won't run it past a native speaker.)