Vocabulary
In this lesson you will learn the Bulgarian words for a few animals. You will learn them one by one in the exercises but here they all are:
- bird: птица
- fish: риба
- mouse: мишка
- snake: змия
- animal: животно
- cow: крава
- goat: коза
- horse: кон
- pig: прасе
- elephant: слон
- duck: патица
- lion: лъв
- monkey: маймуна
- rabbit: заек
- spider: паяк
- tail: опашка
- wing: крило
Exceptions
Most of these words have regular plurals and definite forms. However, here are a couple of exceptions:
Животно (animal) - plural: животни, definite plural: животните.
Кон (horse) has an irregular plural: коне (like мъж/мъже). It also has an irregular definite form: конят when it's the subject of the sentence, and коня when it's the object.
There are quite a few masculine words that use the -ят/-я definite article. We'll point them out throughout the course. Here's one word that you've seen before: ден (day), денят/деня (the day).
Заек (rabbit) - plural: зайци.
It is in fact a general rule that masculine words ending in -к have a plural in -ци.
The plural of паяк (spider) is паяци. However, the к remains in the numeral plural: два паяка.
A note about generalizing statements
In the exercises of this lesson you will find a few sentences that are generalizing statements.
To sound natural in Bulgarian, you should use definite forms for subjects and non-definite forms for objects when making generalizing statements. For example, "women like cats" would translate as "жените харесват котки".
Note how the subject has the -те definite article, but the object doesn't.
However, if you had a house full of people and animals and you wanted to say that the women of this particular group like these particular cats, it would be correct to say: "жените харесват котките" (the women like the cats).