Graded Bulgarian Reading Passages for Your Students

Key Structural Facts About Bulgarian

Speakers

About 6.8 million native speakers (2019–2023) and 1.2 million second-language speakers (2021), according to the figures cited in Wikipedia's Bulgarian language article. In Bulgaria's 2021 census it was the first language of 77% of the population, about 5.04 million people.¹

Did you know?

Unlike most Slavic languages, Bulgarian has lost its noun case endings and marks definiteness with a suffixed article instead, as in приятели → приятелите ('the friends').¹

The main challenge

The verb system carries a lot of load: two past tenses, the aorist for completed events and the imperfect for background or repeated ones, plus renarrative forms for reported events (той бил, 'he reportedly was').²

CEFR exams

• Standardized tests in Bulgarian language proficiency (Sofia University "St. Kliment Ohridski"; CEFR/ALTE levels A2–C2)
• ECL Bulgarian (ECL Consortium; currently scheduled at B1, B2 and C1)

Where students struggle

• The definite article goes on the first word of the noun phrase, not on the noun: приятелите ('the friends') but добрите приятели ('the good friends').³

Teaching notes

• Bulgarian has no infinitive, so teach искам да... ('I want to...') with a present-tense verb as a frame from the start: искам да уча ('I want to study').²

Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_language
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_grammar

About the Bulgarian language

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_language
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_grammar
3. https://wals.info/valuesets/81A-bul
4. https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/languages_en

Bulgarian reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR)

Stichos levels are modelled on the Council of Europe’s CEFR reading descriptors; A0 roughly corresponds to the CEFR’s Pre-A1 band. Sofia University runs standardised Bulgarian tests at A2 to C2; Stichos does not test or certify.

Reference corpora

The main reference corpus for frequency and usage is national and very large.¹

• Bulgarian National Corpus: Built at the Institute for Bulgarian Language “Prof. L. Andreychin” of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, its Bulgarian core holds about 1.2 billion words in more than 240,000 texts, mostly written Bulgarian from 1945 onwards, alongside 47 parallel corpora.¹
• Standard language: Stichos writes Bulgarian readers in standard literary Bulgarian (книжовен български език) and avoids regional dialect vocabulary and slang.

1. https://dcl.bas.bg/bulnc/en/

Readability design principles

Readability measurement for Bulgarian is at an early stage.¹

• A first index: Kazakov, Minkov, Margova, Temnikova and Emauilov (2025) report the first attempt at a Bulgarian readability index. They modelled word length, sentence length, syllable counts and frequency-based information against school grade, using end-of-year assessment texts and children’s literature; polynomial models fitted better than linear ones.¹
• Stichos: Stichos controls difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits rather than a score. At A0 a sentence has at most five words and no conjunctions.

1. https://aclanthology.org/2025.lowresnlp-1.18/

Script & grammar scaffolding

• Tenses: A0 uses only the present (сегашно време). A1 adds the future with ще before any past tense. A2 opens the aorist (минало свършено време) and the imperfect (минало несвършено време). B1 adds the perfect (минало неопределено време), the imperative and да constructions; B2 adds the pluperfect, the future in the past and the conditional.
• Reported speech forms: The renarrative mood (преизказно наклонение), which marks information the speaker did not witness, is kept out through A2. B1 still excludes its complex forms, B2 allows basic ones, and the full system opens at C1.
• The definite article: Bulgarian has no separate word for “the”: the article is a suffix on the first word of the noun phrase, as in човекът (“the man”) and добрият човек (“the good man”).
• Clitics and register: Short object pronouns such as го, я, ми and му never open a sentence. Friends use ти; polite address uses Вие.

Related academic & framework resources

• The CEFR Levels (Council of Europe): The Council of Europe’s description of the six common reference levels, A1 to C2.
• Standardized Tests in Bulgarian Language Proficiency (Sofia University): Sofia University’s CEFR/ALTE-level tests of Bulgarian as a foreign language, from A2 to C2.
• Bulgarian National Corpus: The corpus home page at the Institute for Bulgarian Language, with search tools.
• Towards Creating a Bulgarian Readability Index: The 2025 paper from the LowResNLP workshop in Varna.

Frequently Asked Questions

What can I try on the site today?

The free preview on this page lets you generate live A0 and A1 stories with tap-to-translate words. Every line can also show a translation in your student's own language. Additionally, you can receive 3 free sample stories as a PDF by joining the Reading List without creating an account.

Which levels will be available when Educator Studio launches?

At launch, Educator Studio will cover every level from A0 to B2. You will be able to pick any topic for a story so you never have to reuse a text.

How will I share stories with my students at launch?

At launch, you can share any story you generate by giving students a link, with no limit on how many share links you create. Students open the link directly in their browser without creating an account, though they can choose to create a free account to save their words and stories.

What features will help me customize texts for my curriculum at launch?

At launch, you will be able to paste a word list so Stichos writes a level-matched story using those terms, turn specific tenses on or off, and edit any sentence or translation before sharing the story. Educator Studio will also print reading sheets as PDFs complete with line-by-line translations and a glossary.

How does audio pronunciation work for students?

At launch, students reading a shared text can tap a word to hear it pronounced in a standard computer voice. If you add the Premium Audio add-on at launch, you get natural-sounding voices for word pronunciation, full story narration with different voices for dialogue speakers, and an MP3 export option for you and your students.

Are the generated stories completely error-free?

Stories are written by AI and checked automatically against grammar and vocabulary rules for that level. Because the check is automated rather than done by a human editor, an occasional slip can get through, so you should review each story before sending it to your class.

How does Bulgarian differ from other Slavic languages?

Bulgarian has lost its noun case endings and marks definiteness with a suffixed article, like приятели becoming приятелите ('the friends'). The definite article attaches to the first word of the noun phrase, as seen in добрите приятели ('the good friends'). It also relies heavily on its verb system, featuring two past tenses (aorist and imperfect) and renarrative forms like той бил ('he reportedly was'), while lacking an infinitive, making frames like искам да... ('I want to...') essential from the start.