Grammar and Morphology: Parts of Speech and Their Forms
Parts of speech to master
Know the difference between nouns, adjectives, pronouns, verbs, numerals, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and particles. For each, know its grammatical categories:
- Nouns: gender, number, definiteness (членуване).
- Adjectives: agreement with the noun in gender, number and definiteness.
- Verbs: person, number, tense, aspect (свършен/несвършен вид).
- Pronouns: personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative.
Frequent traps
- Wrong definite article: -ът/-ят for masculine subject, -а/-я for object.
- Mixing aspect with tense: прочетох is past and completed; четях is past and ongoing.
- Using the wrong pronoun case after prepositions.
- Forgetting that adjectives must agree with their noun, not with the subject of the sentence.
Rule of thumb
Find the noun first, then check every word that describes it. For the masculine article, ask: is this noun the subject of the sentence? If yes, use -ът/-ят.
Worked example
Ученикът прочете книгата. - Ученикът is the subject, so it takes -ът. Книгата is the object and is feminine, so it takes -та. If we reverse the roles: Книгата беше прочетена от ученика - now ученика is no longer the subject and loses the -ът.