Why I Started Writing My Own Bulgarian Textbook

I started writing my own Bulgarian textbook because the first grammar rules I had learned were fading while new ones kept arriving, and I was supposed to know them. It began as notes on single rules and grew into a recap. It ended up showing me what I had actually learned, and what learning in small slices does to the early pieces. This post is about that, and a question I can't fully answer.

What I Was Trying to Do

I didn't have a very strong reason. I had a loose idea that it would be good for me to repeat and catch up on the grammar we had covered and that I was supposed to know. The first rules were starting to fade as new ones kept arriving, and I could feel it happening. It started smaller than a textbook.

I would write down one rule, and almost every time I would try to relate it to how my own language handles the same thing, or whether it has anything like it at all. That comparison was the scaffolding I had been missing in class, so I built it myself without really deciding to. I was also trying to determine if there were fast rules, soft patterns or one just needed to memorize some things. The notes grew into a document where I could look rules up, write them down in my own words, and slowly catch up.

Sources didn't always fully agree. Different books cover different soft patterns and exceptions, and different teachers teach different ones. In my experience, Bulgarian follows strict rules more than my own L1 language does, but it still has places where things are softer patterns rather than rules.

How Did the Gaps Form in the First Place?

Mostly through the setup, as far as I can tell. Many of my teachers were native Bulgarian speakers who didn't know my first language well, so they couldn't build on it, and in some periods rules were skipped in favour of examples and exercises, which worked less well for a concept that has no counterpart in my own language.

The alphabet added some friction too, with some Cyrillic letters looking like Latin ones but sounding different, and handwritten forms complicating it further, and transliterations that varied from teacher to teacher. I actually had a good grasp of the letters from earlier self-studying and from attending beginner courses multiple times, but many of my fellow students would struggle and I suspect it made my teachers sometimes rush other things.

The rules that matched nothing in my own language were the ones I got the least clarity about, especially when a lesson was short on time. I don't blame anyone for that. Teaching a mixed group is hard, and I've had a lot of good lessons.

What Writing It Actually Taught Me

Mostly it taught me what I already knew, which turned out to be worth a lot. The rules that had not been explained clearly (or understood clearly by me) still took work, and the book is where I finally pinned some of them down, usually by working out where my own language does the same thing and where it does nothing of the kind. Also, consulting various textbooks I picked up over the years and consulting online sources also helped with different explanations and examples.

Grammar arrives in slices. For one word class you might first learn a small piece, say indefinite and definite forms of feminine nouns. Later come the other genders, and later still some fairly strict patterns for deciding a noun's gender, with exceptions or alternative patterns that not every book covers. You learn a little here and a little there, so you never see the whole word class at once. By the time plurals arrive, the singular is already slipping.

Writing the book allowed me to organize it like a wanted myself, and allowed me to see all the noun rules in one place: three genders, singular and plural, indefinite and definite. It was a small joy the few times I realized I knew "all" the rules for one word class. Looking up rules and putting them in my own words mostly made me understand and remember what I had been taught at the time, which is what I needed.

What This May Reveal About Learning

When you learn many things at once and in slices, the early pieces wear down if not repeated and rehearsed as we have written about before under Spaced Repetition. I was working on pronunciation and new grammar all together, and sometimes being corrected on something we hadn't reached yet. For me, something had to give, and what gave was what I had learned first. The connections went, and so did the sense of mastering it.

Organising the material myself put those connections back, both between the Bulgarian rules and between Bulgarian and the language I already had. Creating beats consuming I guess, because consuming never asked me to fit the pieces together. The cost is time, and most learners don't have it, including me on a normal week.

Can This Kind of Engagement Be Made Accessible?

Partly, I think. I don't believe most learners should write their own textbook, and I'm not sure they'd need to if the materials they already used gave them the overview and the recap. That is what structured, connected materials can offer, even when a teacher built the structure: a place to see how the pieces fit together, and to return to when the early ones fade.

A teacher-built structure still gives the learner something a single lesson cannot always give. The teacher chooses what to cover and in what order, knows the learner's level, and can aim the material at the places where that learner gets stuck. This is roughly what we think about when building Edumo, where a teacher can turn a text or topic into exercises, grammar drills included, that fit what the class is working on. The learner still isn't doing the organising, so it is a different benefit from the one I got.

The Takeaway

I don't have a clean conclusion. Writing my own Bulgarian textbook helped me remember and understand what I had already been taught, at a cost in time I can't recommend to anyone with a full schedule. If creating materials teaches you more than consuming them, who ends up doing the creating, and how much of the benefit survives being handed to someone else? I still don't know. Have you ever learned more from creating materials than from using them? What did you create?