On Saturday, during classes at the Bulgarian school in Troy, Brandon, an American, came and amazed us all with his knowledge of the Bulgarian language. Here’s what else we learned:
– Who is Branden Prather?
– I was born and raised in Michigan. I am from a small rural town in Lenawee County. The closest city anyone might remotely recognize is Adrian. At university, I became obsessed with languages, both foreign languages and the mechanics of language generally. I studied foreign languages and literature. I mostly focused on German, but I had some Spanish and some Russian, too. I was a teacher for a while, and now, I am an attorney.
– When did you visit Bulgaria and what did you do there?
– I had always dreamed of spreading my love and passion for foreign languages, so I sought to live abroad and teach languages. The opportunity to live and work in Bulgaria presented itself in 2015, and I seized it. I lived and worked in Sofia until 2018.
– What did you bring from Bulgaria?
– The best memories I have from Bulgaria are playing music with students, exchanging language and linguistic insights with students and others, using Bulgarian to navigate my surroundings and to connect with people, hiking in Vitosha, and enjoying delicious food (eg banitsa).
– Why is Bulgaria unknown to many Americans?
– The typical American can probably name only 10 or so countries in the entire world, and those countries either have a large geographic footprint, large GDP, and/or large geopolitical presence. Although Bulgaria is very rich in other ways, it does not have those attributes, so it unfortunately goes unnoticed. More banitsa for me.
– How did you learn to speak Bulgarian language?
– I cheated when I arrived in Bulgaria because I had already done the heavy lifting: I had learned Cyrillic and had struggled through all the grammatical cases and weird spelling rules in Russian. Bulgarian is purely phonetic and almost as devoid of cases as English is, which makes learning it easy. I took some lessons for a bit, but I largely learned by going out into the wild and engaging in conversation. I was also able to make my way by just using intuition. Many language structures are common across at least Indo-European languages, so even though I had not formally learned something in Bulgarian, I was often able to guess and work my way through a sentence with some success.
– What is your message to the Bulgarians in Detroit?
– My message to the Bulgarians in Detroit is thank you for welcoming me and for allowing me to connect with the community. It was very nice and nostalgic for me to connect with the group. I was able to reminisce on my time there and share common experiences with the community. My other message is where have you guys been? I had no idea that Michigan is home to so many Bulgarians. I think it is wonderful.
