While on my coffee break, I visited the Bulgarian Wikipedia page for the town I’ll be living close to (6KM) away. I very painstakingly transliterated the Cyrillic Ябланица into Roman characters and got.. Yablanitsa. Exactly what my host calls the town.

Then, I got to the word География and I just knew it was “geography” because of the e,o, and recognising the final character, the backwards R, as being a “ya” sound. Again, I painstakingly transliterated it into Roman characters and got.. geografiya.

The switch finally went off in my brain! Now, I know that I just need to carry a Cyrillic alphabet cheat sheet so I can transliterate what I’m reading and, thanks to the number of English and French loan words in Bulgarian and words that tend to be mutually intelligible in many languages thanks to common Greek and Latin roots, I should be able to come up with something I vaguely understand. Yes, it will be a very slow process at the beginning, but once I master the Cyrillic alphabet, reading should go much more quickly.

I remember when this happened when I was learning Japanese hirigana characters and a whole portion of that language opened up to me. It’s rather exciting to have it happen with Bulgarian right before departure!