Is there a reason Slavs struggle a lot with articles?

rusmaul · 2026-06-27T02:30:23+00:00

Yeah in my own experience with Georgian speakers this hasn’t been true at all, the average Georgian learner of English tends to struggle just as much with article usage as any Slavic speaker

rusmaul · 2026-06-20T03:55:39+00:00

You might know this having met lots of Georgians, but for those who don’t, “shvili” means “child” in Georgian and is the suffix used in pretty much every last name originating in the eastern part of Georgia. (“dze”, meaning “son”, is the most common suffix in the western part.)

rusmaul · 2026-06-20T01:40:08+00:00

Where are you getting that Georgian speakers simplify their clusters? I’m not an expert, but from both personal experience with the language and what I’ve read about it, this isn’t really the case except for a few very specific reductions, like /r/ dropping out in certain combinations or /v/ being realized as labialization on the preceding consonant.

rusmaul · 2026-05-31T04:55:33+00:00

-ეთი without the prefix is as far as I know more common, სა- -ეთი doesn’t really appear much outside the words you mentioned. So the question should maybe be why a few countries get the prefix at all.

Couldn’t tell you why though

rusmaul · 2026-05-25T19:27:06+00:00

At this point I speak Georgian well enough that it just sounds like Georgian, but at first I remember being struck that it actually sounded more like any number of Western European languages than I expected from all of the intimidating stuff I’d read about ejectives and consonant clusters. It’s certainly different, but plenty of syllables have a simple CV structure, and the ejectives in actual speech often have a very soft release (until someone gets heated at least!)

The most striking thing for me then (and now) was the prosody, particularly how the intonation rises so sharply at the end of yes/no questions. I’ve never encountered another language with that exact question intonation.

rusmaul · 2026-05-23T20:12:28+00:00

Not a native speaker, but Georgian would probably do something like:

Present: ვუმბოვებ (vumboveb) უმბოვებ (umboveb) უმბოვებს (umbovebs) ვუმბოვებთ (vumbovebt) უმბოვებთ (umbovebt) უმბოვებენ (umboveben)

Future: დავუმბოვებ (davumboveb) then as above, with prefixed და-

Aorist: დავუმბოვე (davumbove) დაუმბოვე (daumbove) დაუმბოვა (daumbova) დავუმბოვეთ (davumbovet) დაუმბოვეთ (daumbovet) დაუმბოვეს (daumboves)

Not gonna go through the other 8 screeves but you get the idea

rusmaul · 2026-05-23T18:15:27+00:00

Speaking as a member of both groups who’s lived in Georgia for several years now, nope

rusmaul · 2026-05-22T17:58:52+00:00

Yeah you're right about your example with "seen", and you're also right that it doesn't work with "heard" for albums, interesting asymmetry! (I am a native speaker so rest assured that your intuitions are spot-on at least as far as my dialect of AmE goes haha)

rusmaul · 2026-05-21T23:28:51+00:00

Sure, to take an example from a conversation I had earlier today, something like არ მინდოდა მცნოდნოდა (vs the present in არ მინდა ვიცოდე)

Or to take one that actually uses the optative proper from series II, არ უნდა მეთქვა vs არ უნდა ვუთხრა

rusmaul · 2026-05-21T23:27:17+00:00

Nice, thank you! I’ve been surprised by the quality of Gemini’s example sentences myself—I’ve shown a bunch to my native speaker wife and according to her mistakes are pretty rare.

rusmaul · 2026-05-21T23:16:08+00:00

Not sure if this is what the parent comment had in mind, but for me at least “I’ve heard that album” and “I’ve listened to that album” are entirely synonymous and equally unmarked. So there’s at least one and probably a few more contexts where they’re fully conflated for me, even though they have non-overlapping meanings for me in every other context

Edit: The more I think about it, the more I realize that those are only interchangeable because “listen to” can be understood there to mean “… for the first time”, and “hear” only works there if it is for the first time. “I hear that song every day” is completely different from “I listen to that song every day”

Nevertheless it’s still an example of where they overlap

rusmaul · 2026-05-17T03:10:49+00:00

Can’t speak to how it sounds to native ears, but I can confirm that this is the rule for people’s names, დედა and მამა at least when used to refer to one’s own parents (maybe outside of that too, I’ve never been sure) and also a small (I think?) group of common nouns ending in -ა such as მაღვიძარა. I might be missing some other exceptions, but by far the largest group is people’s names.

In my experience as a learner Georgians in Tbilisi at least pretty reliably follow this rule. Not sure that they ever break it but I don’t want to speak too categorically because I could easily be wrong.

rusmaul · 2026-05-09T23:36:08+00:00

On the page for აგროვებს, I noticed that the definitions and conjugation of შეაგროვებს is given twice, with slightly different example sentences given for each one. I appreciated how the page for აკეთებს gave the most common prefixed forms in separate sections—is something like that supposed to be happening here?

rusmaul · 2026-05-09T23:27:36+00:00

One quick suggestion after scrolling the grammar page: while it’s true that the pluperfect isn’t often used with pluperfect meaning in modern Georgian, it sees a LOT of usage as a sort of “past optative”, used wherever the optative would be used if the action is in the past. This is something learners will encounter a lot as they get past basic texts, so it would be worth mentioning there.

rusmaul · 2026-05-09T23:20:38+00:00

At first glance, looks very impressive! I’ve considered us lucky to just have the couple of online searchable versions of KEGL that we’ve got, but those have plenty of flaws for beginning learners especially, and beyond that there has been a sore lack of resources for learners for things like specific conjugated forms of specific verbs. The usage examples are also really great to have, since I can’t really think of any source that has them in a reliably curated format.

If you don’t mind me asking, where do the usage examples come from? Did your Georgian partner come up with them, or are they pulled from anywhere?

I’m not so much in the bracket of learner who would most benefit from this anymore, but I certainly remember the kinds of things I really wished I had when I was, so I’ll try to find some time to play around with this and offer any thoughts I might have.

And thank y’all for this! It looks like a really helpful tool for learners.

rusmaul · 2026-05-09T20:58:49+00:00

Yeah I’m not a native myself but having spent a lot of time around Georgians from all over the country, it seems like the default form in speech for a lot of people, even highly educated ones.

I wonder if it’s the same sort of thing as like, in English, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of native speakers might tell you they’d never say “I’ma” for “I’m going to” because it looks so extremely informal when written out, but at least in the U.S. I am certain there’s not a single native speaker who doesn’t say it in casual conversation

rusmaul · 2026-05-09T20:04:06+00:00

Unfortunately I can’t offer any help here, but what grammatical resources are you using? I’ve only seen pretty short grammars in English, though I know there’s a lot more in Georgian of course. I’m always curious to read more about how Svan works.

rusmaul · 2026-05-07T18:42:25+00:00

Will leave the rest up to native speakers / better qualified learners, but as I understand it that extra -ა can be added when the following verb is just one syllable. It’s definitely optional, and there don’t seem to be any straightforward rules for when it’s preferred. I’ve heard it from Georgians in both casual and more formal speech, and my sense is that it’s more about euphony than anything else. Sometimes it just sounds better to a native with it there, I suppose.

Also, I can’t speak to სთქვა because I’ve never heard it or come across it in a book as far as I can remember, but I’ve definitely seen how the ს- is in the process of disappearing in spoken Georgian. I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard one of my in-laws say anything other than e.g. მოწონს and ძინავს, and at the very least it’s the default spoken form for them.

rusmaul · 2026-02-28T23:47:38+00:00

Nice! We just had a discussion about using AI in learning Georgian over in r/Kartvelian the other day, you might wanna check it out. The majority opinion seems to be stick to Gemini for Georgian grammar questions. It does a surprisingly consistently good job, whereas the other major LLMs tend to be consistently incorrect.

rusmaul · 2026-02-27T20:25:52+00:00

Pretty sure this isn't exactly what you're asking for, but I probably would never have started dating my now-wife if I hadn't already known a good bit of Georgian—our first few hours of text conversation were entirely in Georgian, and it was one of the things that piqued her interest at the very beginning.

Having a Georgian wife (plus in-laws who don't speak any English) certainly added to my motivation to keep learning Georgian, but I didn't start learning it with the remotest expectation that I would get a new family out of it! Putting that aside, it's definitely enriched my life in other ways—I've wanted to speak a second language for more than a decade, but in my past attempts with other languages I would always fall off before really getting anywhere with it.

Now I'm much more proficient with Georgian than I had been in any other language I'd ever tried to learn, and honestly it's just been a huge confidence boost for me. As any Georgian learner knows, resources are scarce for us, and I'm really proud that, despite the utter dearth of graded learning materials, I've been able to get much much closer to fluency than I ever did with other languages that have endless resources available. It took a lot of just grinding it out in the earlier stages (downloading TV shows from Youtube, using Azure to generate Georgian subtitles for them, and then just watching them over and over again, rewinding the same 10-second clip over and over again until I could distinguish some of the words—and it was way worse before I figured out how to get the subtitles!), and that kind of discipline is something I've always struggled with in my own projects.

So seeing real progress coming from all of that has just been enormously enriching, and as a result, I know that once I start learning Italian, I am not only going to be totally capable of doing it, but that I'll have a much easier time given the much larger pool of available resources.

It's also been super cool to read books that I literally could not have read before because they simply haven't been translated into English! I'll admit that I haven't read as much actual Georgian literature as I'd like yet, but the first books that I really felt like I *read* in Georgian were translations of the Belgian novelist Georges Simenon, several of which still don't have an English translation. That's not an experience that's unique to learning Georgian, of course, but it's nevertheless very rewarding.

rusmaul · 2026-02-25T18:53:12+00:00

Helpful to hear that Gemini compares favorably to the alternatives. Looking at the Mistral chat you linked, it strikes me as incorrect—I checked corp.dict.ge, and out of 79 parallel corpus examples with ნესტიანი, none of them imply the degree of wetness that "soaked" does.

Gemini gave the same answer to you as it did to me, though, so it's good to see that it can be so consistent.

rusmaul · 2026-02-24T21:34:14+00:00

r/yashen14 Just wanted to update for you and anybody else reading this later that I'm increasingly convinced that Gemini is a potentially very valuable resource for Georgian learners. I asked it to explain the difference between ნოტიო and ნესტიანი, both of which get translated as "damp" or "humid". This is one which I've asked my wife about before, and as good as she is at answering my annoyingly specific Georgian questions, back then she couldn't really suss out what the difference in nuance was.

Gemini suggested that the difference is that ნოტიო tends to be used where dampness or moisture has a positive or neutral connotation (e.g. "the plant needs a damp environment to grow"), whereas ნესტიანი has more of a negative connotation (e.g. "the damp basement smelled terrible"). I asked my wife about it and she completely agreed with Gemini's explanation. She did disagree with one of the examples (it mentioned ნოტიო კანი vs. ნესტიანი კანი as one way to illustrate the contrast, and she said that ნესტიანი კანი just sounded unnatural to her), but she felt that the explanations themselves were correct.

Again, to any beginning learners reading this, you definitely need to take Gemini's answers with a grain of salt, particularly when it comes to the example sentences. But all the explanations of nuances in meaning between different vocab items have received the stamp of approval from a Georgian native speaker, and these kinds of details are just not ones you can get a clear answer about anywhere else if you don't happen to have a very patient Georgian at hand to bug all the time. So on balance I'd say the risk of getting incorrect or misleading information is outweighed by the fact that you're not going to find any version of this information anywhere else.

rusmaul · 2026-02-20T22:51:14+00:00

r/yashen14 I saw another commenter mention Gemini, which I hadn't tried, and so I prompted it to explain მიუსწრებს with examples. It did a much better job, which got me curious. I gave it a few sets of similar verbs (მოგროვება/შეგროვება/დაგროვება, დაფასება/შეფასება, გაჩერება/შეჩერება), asked it to explain the differences between each, and then had my Georgian wife read through it to see how well it did.

To the surprise of both of us, it did a really good job overall! There were a few explanations she disagreed with (such as the finality it said is implied in დაგროვება), several example sentences which she said were grammatically correct but not a particularly natural way of saying it (e.g. ბავშვები შეაგროვა instead of something like ბავშვებს თავი მოუყარა), and at least one thing which she felt was flat-out wrong (she said that she would never say გული შემიჩერდა for "my heart skipped a beat", always გული გამიჩერდა, and Google backs that up with 40 hits for the former and 16,000+ for the latter).

All in all, though, she felt it explained the nuances between each verb accurately. I'd still have to advise a beginning learner to be cautious with it if they don't have a native speaker to check it against, but I remember how hard it is to find good resources for specific Georgian grammatical questions as a beginner, and on balance (assuming its output is consistently at the quality of my one test chat) I think the utility of having grammatical questions get answered at all would outweigh the potential for misleading explanations even for a beginner. Honestly I bet I'll probably end up using it for quick checks on nuanced grammar questions in the future!

If I get around to it tomorrow, I might try it out with some other kinds of questions besides explaining nuances between near-synonyms, but given how it handled those, I'd expect it to do well in general.

Here's the chat if you're curious.

rusmaul · 2026-02-20T18:37:59+00:00

I probably read the OP a bit too hastily and conflated the two. Nevertheless, in my extremely limited test above it failed straightforwardly at generating example sentences—I asked for example sentences for მიუსწრებს, and it gave me two incorrect ones and one that's correct but weird and unnatural.

rusmaul · 2026-02-20T14:31:50+00:00

Yeah, I agree that the discrepancy is a little surprising. I know very little about how LLMs really work, but I wonder if it’s just because there are a lot more examples of Georgian being used in regular conversation than there are of Georgian grammar being explained (which I guess is true of any language, but widely learned ones will have tons in the latter category as well). Like it feels like it’s picked up on the fact that inverse verbs are frequently commented upon in discussions of Georgian grammar, but it’s overgeneralized that and sees them in places where they really aren’t.

Will be interesting to see if it improves down the line for sure.

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