Interlinear books are bilingual translations where the original has a translation right below each word or expression. Try them out on Interlinear Books.
For multilingual verb conjugation, try CoolJugator - a tool that can currently conjugate in dozens of different languages. It also recognizes forms and provides examples for each verb.
...so far just in Polish and Macedonian. The flyby which is happening right now (closest approach in one hour) should lead to articles in other languages, but that isn't always the case.
Read more...I made a quick video on YouTube just now showing an example of Macedonian from Deutsche Welle's Radio D, the radio course I often criticize for being a sucky Germany course but praise for its plethora of audio and matching text in a great number of other languages, for many of which it's hard to find these for.
These texts are not too hard to make: simply use a program like Audacity to remove everything but the Macedonian audio (or other language), which will reduce the length from about 15 minutes to 5. Then copy and paste the text from the pdf into Google Translate, and now you have a mostly yet not entirely accurate, sometimes awkward, but helpful translation to work from. Here's kind of what the final result looks like.
Thanks to the Defense Language Institute you don't have to work so hard to obtain these texts in a great number of otherwise rare languages, but there are still a few missing where Deutsche Welle is quite helpful.
A title like that seems just made for controversy. I do have a reason for wading into the fray though.
First of all an example of the fray: the comments below this video recorded by my favourite polyglot.
Even though the video is just a video in Macedonian about learning languages, the comments below are a complete firestorm. BLARGH YOU'RE JUST SPEAKING BULGARIAN ANYWAY WHATEVER and DON'T LISTEN TO TOHSE GREASY BULGARIANS TRY TO SAY MACEDONIAN ISNT A LANGUAGE is a good summary of how the debate goes. Read them if you dare.
I would like to add a third perspective to the debate, however.
One perspective is academic and linguistic, which naturally concludes that Macedonian is a standardized form of a dialect continuum that goes from Bulgaria and into Macedonia and Greece and Albania, and is strongly related but somewhat less so to Serbo-Croatian and up into Slovenian, which has some faint but interesting ties to Slovakian and so on. Macedonian happens to be a standardized form based in the centre to the west of FYROM Macedonia, and Bulgarian is a standardized form of the dialect continuum from the east of the country.
The political perspective is where all the arguments take place, and has to do with whether Macedonians avoid Bulgarisms and prefer Serbian whenever possible, whether Skopje was chosen as the capital on purpose, etc. etc. I won't get into that.
The third and most ignored perspective, however, is that of the student. The language student simply wants to know two things: can the standardized version of a language be learned and properly used on the street, and how hard is it to learn? According to the video it seems that Macedonian is used mostly like the version one reads but with a lot of Turkish slang.
What about the second point? Is there anything about Macedonian that makes learning it a different experience than learning Bulgarian? There is, and the main difference to a student is this: wonderful, blessed, regular stress.
Bulgarian is thought by many to be the easiest Slavic language for an English speaker to learn given the lack of cases in regular nouns. Word order is quite straightforward (lack of cases helps out here), and the two difficulties regularly cited are: verbs and variable stress.
Verbs because Bulgarian has more aspects and tenses than other Slavic languages. Macedonian has this too.
Variable stress because the stress of a noun is unpredictable. Water is vodá and not vóda, I understand is razbíram and not rázbiram, what is kakvó and not kákvo, many is mnógo and not mnogó. It's more or less the same as having to remember in English that you are a photógrapher who takes phótographs and not a phótographer who takes photógraphs - not the hardest thing in the world to remember but not something you want to get wrong. It's why the FSI (Foreign Service Institute) Bulgarian text has a lot of this to remind you:
Two interesting things to share today.
First is this page, containing grammar textbooks for a total of eight languages: Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Georgian, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, and Slovene. The most valuable of these due to scarcity of good resources are probably Georgian, Macedonian, and Slovene.
The second is simply a Wikipedia page on a language I never knew about until today called Polabian, an extinct Slavic language with a huge amount of German influence. One look at the Lord's Prayer shows just how extensive this was:
Here's a short article from Macedonian Radio and Television (Македонска Радио Телевизија) on the languages high school students will be using for the 2008/2009 academic year:
12,030 places in all municipalities across Macedonia are available, out which 7,579 are envisaged for Macedonian language classes, 4,029 for Albanian, 276 for Turkish and 68 for Serbian language classes.Wikipedia also gives the following on the number of hours broadcast by the same station in each language:
Macedonian Radio broadcasts programmes in all the languages of the national minorities in the Republic of Macedonia, including Albanian (from 1948) 8,5 hours; Turkish (from 1945) 5 hours; Vlach (from 1991); Romany (from 1991); Serbian (from 2003) and Bosnian (from 2003) all 30 minutes each per day. Also programmes in Bulgarian and Serbian are broadcasted in the "Radio Macedonia" slot.Read more...
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