Read Your First Bulgarian Story Today

Quick 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

Sources

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

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 writing system does Bulgarian use?

Cyrillic: the 30-letter Bulgarian alphabet, in its present form since the 1945 spelling reform

Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?

Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.

Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?

Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.

Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?

Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.

Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?

Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.

How does word lookup work while reading?

Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.

Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?

Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.

Do stories include audio or narration?

Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).