On Sunday I am going to start studying Bulgarian with my new language tutor I.  I. is a really nice Bulgarian who studied Bulgarian and English at the University of Plovdiv and now lives in Sofia.  The best part is that I met her though my blog.

As luck would have it she speaks Bulgarian better than I do and is willing to work with me in my pursuit to learn more Bulgarian.  She also has a really cool boyfriend.  The last time I saw him he told me, in English, that I should stop speaking to my American friends and only speak to Bulgarian in Bulgarian because that's the only way I'll learn the language.  There's a part of me that couldn't agree more.  It's a pretty straightforward and pragmatic solution when it comes to learning Bulgarian.

Then there's a part of me that couldn't be happier that his girlfriend is the one who will actually be teaching me Bulgarian.  She seems to be a little more measured about the whole thing.  But in preparation for our first lesson on Sunday she did ask me how many Bulgarian words I thought I knew.

Um, that's a really hard question.

I thought about it for a minute and told her that I thought I knew maybe 300 words.  Oh and as soon as that came out of my mouth I realized how stupid that sounded.  I've been living in Bulgaria for a year and I managed to learn only one new word a day.  When in comparison, my students at the First English Language School and now the American College are expected to learn between 30 and 50 new words a day.

This made me wonder if I maybe learned more words this last year and I was just underestimating myself. So last night I started making a list of all of the Bulgarian words I know.  Yes.  I started making a list.  This morning I kept working on it.

The list was both good and bad.  First it made me realize that I do know a lot of Bulgarian more so when I compare what I know now to when I started a year ago.  But it also made me realize what a bad speller I am.  I know that everyone says the nice thing about Bulgarian is that it's phonetic language but I still have problems with a couple of the vowels--mostly the Y and ъ-- I am just not very good at hearing the difference.

So in the end the list was kind of depressing.  Sure it was a record of how far I've come and I am still thinking of words to add but really I got to about 300--maybe slightly more--but it's also a record of how little I seem to have applied myself this last year.

It's brought me to this moment: no more excuses.  I need to learn 15 words a day.  This won't make me fluent but it will give me a decent vocabulary in 6 months.  Yes, I used to like to tell myself that Bulgarian is hard and so is the alphabet but really that's not an excuse.  I just need to buckle down and start memorizing words.  Here I go.