Jamie Learns Georgian

So far, I have only dipped my toes into the Georgian language, but I have discovered some interesting things.

Their counting system is quite interesting. It seems pretty normal up til 29. This is how the direct translation would go:

Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, twenty-ten, twenty-eleven, twenty-twelve, twenty-thirteen, and so on, until you get to 40, which is it's own word again, not twenty-twenty. Fifty is forty-ten, 60 is it's own word, 70 is sixty-ten, and so on. 

I found the most difficult part of learning German to be the 4 cases. I had to figure out what case a noun was in (nominative, accusative, dative, or genitive), based on its function in the sentence. However, this information was useless unless I knew whether the noun was feminine, masculine, or neuter to begin with. If I knew that, I had to try to remember what sort of ending that gender of noun took in each case. This was much too much work for me, so usually I just added whatever sort of ending suited my fancy as I was talking. A couple years later, after turning in a paper in German on Berthold Brecht's The Life of Galileo, I was informed by the overwhelming amount of red on my draft that my fancy was usually wrong.

In Georgian, there are 7 cases, but, mercifully, no gender distinctions. I am aware that there are 7 cases, but I have no idea what most of them are. I am also unaware of how to conjugate most verbs, or how to form anything beyond the simplest of sentences. For that reason, I decided to buy a book that I saw in the English bookstore in Tbilisi called Teach Yourself Georgian. Hopefully, it would explain these things to me. I soon found that I may not learn anything useful from this book, but for entertainment purposes alone, it was worth the 25 lari. 

Here are a few of the useful phrases it teaches you:

"Mother, here is a rowing boat." 

"he/she caresses somebody/ is caressing somebody"

"sunny rain"

"If anybody says something bad about us, let the knife rip his heart out."

"What could  you make blossom?"

"one-eyed"

"I began to twitter" 

"are you not ashamed?"

"from afar I was kissing (your eyes)"

"what are we to make the dowry with?"

"How much longer shall we have our sister unmarried?"

"Why don't you mention the donkey any more?"

"I shall crow."

"Only my stupidity is to blame for what has happened to me!" -this will probably come in handy for me

"We will not let them trample [our motherland] under foot"

"he/she/it is whizzing/dashing here and there"

"strip them naked!"

"bind their hands!"

"smear them!"

"cover their bodies with honey!"

"he/she sat with grand airs"

So as you can see, once I start putting these phrases to use, I will fit right in!