My fiancée is Bulgarian. Her English is excellent, but of her family (all of whom still live in Bulgaria) do not speak any English, except for her brother who has learned some in school. From time to time, she’ll try to teach me a few words, but when her mother visited over the winter, it was very difficult to communicate with her, with either my fiancée or her brother needing to translate for me. Since I will be going to Bulgaria this winter to meet her family, it will be even more difficult for me and I’d like to make a nice impression by at least knowing SOME Bulgarian.
Thus, I’m mostly interested in conversational Bulgarian and mostly comprehension, and not nearly as interested in reading/writing (I fear the cyrilic alphabet).
So… I’ve been looking for resources to learn the language, the problem is, there isn’t much out there because there just isn’t very much demand to learn it. I’ve already checked out RosettaStone and they don’t have a package in Bulgarian. I’ve found a few others like TalkNow! but I am completely unfamiliar with this. Looking for local courses has turned up fruitless as well.
For those of you that have used a software package to learn a language, can you recommend for/against any that might offer Bulgarian? Are there other methods I can use to learn conversational Bulgarian? I will have to give heavy preference to anything I can do at my own pace due to my schedule.
*Mods, I understand if you move this to IMHO. I hoped I would get better answers here.