Hey, I haven't come around for a while, but I've been really busy lately as I started a new full-time job and I still try to sort out my time... which sadly is not dedicated as much to my Albanian learning as I would like. But today I got inspiration as I stumbled upon a really beautiful song I wanted to share...
(excuse me if the formatting still looks bad at some places, I tried to fix it to match, but Blogger hates me today :/)
Ëndërroja t'jem me ty dhe të ndërtoj një
ardhmëri // I was dreaming that I'm with you and that I'm having a future
Fluturoja si
një flutur por krahët mi theve ti // I was flying like a butterfly, but
you broke my wings
S'kam më forcë as të them "kthehu përsëri"! // I don't have more strength even to say "come back again"!
S'kam më forcë as të them "kthehu përsëri"! // I don't have more strength even to say "come back again"!
(The whole
translation by me is here...
I feel like I have to practice my skills so I don't forget it sometimes, haha)
So today's topic of the discussion is one of the past tenses - imperfect. Which, in my opinion, is actually the easiest one as it's probably the only one that has only 3 irregulars - jam, kam and them. I still have such a hard time trying to process all the different classes and subclasses of verbs in the other two past tenses in the indicative mood, and I actually found out that learning them one by one is probably the only way to do that. I like the imperfect as it's fairly straightforward, plus it forms the conditional "would" (do të + imperfect), which is used quite a lot too. The only peculiarity is that some verbs change stem, otherwise the endings are always ja, je, (n)te, nim, nit and nin for anything other than class 6 (reflexives). Regarding them, the endings are (h)esha, (h)eshe, (h)ej, (h)eshim, (h)eshit, (h)eshin. The n/h ones in the brackets are used only if the stem ends in a vowel - easy and straightforward, almost as nothing else in this language!
As a person, I love reading, I even found a children's book sometime ago in a second hand bookstore here, but I still don't feel confident enough to understand it mainly because the past tenses give me a headache. I feel the lack of good resources there, as it's always covered "for a bit" in the books, and always at the end, not giving you enough practice - probably if a higher level book existed, it would be amazing!
Talking about books, verb-wise I'd personally recommend "541 Albanian verbs" by Bruce Hintz and Rozeta Stefanllari - while it doesn't cover absolutely everything, it's still a good base and it has some of the most popular verbs for you to learn.
Probably I should have started with the present, but hey, I just like to discuss whatever impressed me in some way, or whatever I feel like sharing some knowledge about. There are many, many other things that I would love to write about, I hope I will have some more time in the near future.
Natën e mirë, shpresoj që të shkruajmë së shpejti!