Subscription Options:
Popular Posts
Twitter
- New Post: To My Kindle Readers 8 months ago
Tags
accusative adjectives audio books conjunctions dative demonstratives diktāts exceptions genitive grammar imperative infinitive instrumental listening locative names negation nominative nouns numbers photos poetry prepositions pronouns questions reading References reflexive resources reviews sentence structure status text textbooks time transliteration verbs Vocabulary vocative voice words
Monthly Archives: May 2010
A Rose By Any Other Name…
You know what’s challenging? Looking up an author in Latvian to see if their book is available in a translated edition. It’s almost as bad as trying to transliterate Cyrillic to English. (On a semi-related tangent, this is what makes … Continue reading
Infinitives
The infinitive of every non-reflexive Latvian verb ends in -t. The infinitive of every reflexive Latvian verb ends in -ties. So you could also say that to make a verb’s infinitive form reflexive, you just add -ies to the infinitive. … Continue reading
Answering Questions
Latvian is fun when it comes to questions. There are lots of different question words and it seems like almost all of them start with a K. (They don’t all though. There’s vai and cik, for example.) If you think … Continue reading
Interrogating Nouns
What’s really difficult for me is figuring out how to ask questions of words. My husband just does it and I blink at him. It is so completely foreign to me as an English speaker. Here’s what I mean. The … Continue reading
Spelling Dictionaries
A very handy item to have is a Latvian spelling dictionary. It gives most forms for most verbs (mine has an odd blind spot of skipping reflexive verbs), nouns and other parts of speech. When you’re just starting to learn … Continue reading
Latvian Conjugations
Latvian has three conjugations for verbs: Short, Long and Mixed. They can also be referred to as the 1st, 2nd and 3rd conjugations, respectively, but that nomenclature isn’t always consistent. To determine whether a verb fits into the short, long … Continue reading
The Irregulars
There are only three truly irregular verbs: būt, iet, and dot.