Introduction - Сайн байна уу? (Sain bain uu?) (MN)

The Mongolian language is used by over 8,5 million of people, mostly by the residents of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia (autonomous region of the People's Republic of China). It has many dialects, but the most commonly used one is the Khalkha dialect and that's the one that we'll be talking about.

That's where most of people speak Mongolian.

Is Mongolian language difficult? Well, I would say that it's exactly  2,5/5. The biggest difficulty could be its grammar. Also, you'll need to learn the Cyrillic alphabet if you don't know it already but it's not that difficult and you should quickly get used to it.

'A'Gee's Mongolian issues list':

1. Alphabet. As I said, Mongolian is written in Cyrillic alphabet. In fact, originally Mongolian alphabet looked like this: 

Classical Mongolian (written from up to down)

However, in 1950's, along with comunism, Russians introduced Cyrillic alphabet to Mongolia. To help express some sounds they've added 2 more letters to it (ө and ү). We'll discuss all the letters in the next lesson so don't worry about that yet.

2. Pronounciation. It might cause some problems at the beggining as many words in Mongolian are not pronounced exactly as they are written. In most of the words the last vowel is not pronounced at all. The stress in Mongolian is put always on the first syllable of the word. Usually, only the first vowel and the long vowels (like 'aa', 'uu') are pronouned clearly. The rest of the word sound like a cluster of consonants. We'll look closer at this problem later on.

3. Grammar. Basically, Mongolian sentence has a structured order. There has to be an object in the begining and the verb is always at the end, for example: I to school go. Sounds like Yoda xD It's not that difficult but might cause more trouble when the sentence is longer and more complicated. 

However, other grammatical issues might not be as pleasant as Yoda's talk. There are eight cases in Mongolian (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, instrumental, comitative and directional, bla bla bla). The verbs also need to be conjugated according to tenses and so on.

Still, you shouldn't be discouraged be those little difficulties. Mongolian is such a fantastic language! And it's one of te best languages for hip hop music - take a look!