Learning Albanian

Welcome to Learning Albanian.

Shqiponja e madhe në Shqipëri. The eagle is big in Albania.

The name of the Albanian language in Albanian language is 'shqip' and the name of the country Albania is 'Shqipëri' (indefinite (later indef.)) and 'Shqipëria. (definite (later def.))

Both of these could be derived from the word sq.'shqiponja' == en."the eagle" or is it the other way around that shqip is so awesome that the name of the eagle then gotta be shqiponja.

Later-on code like this 'Shqipëri, -a' tells you that the definite form is formed by adding the definite article '-a' to it.

First things to know

Adjectives: first things to know

For those of you who know French you'll feel at home as adjectives and adverbs are placed after the noun also in Albanian.

Nouns and adjectives are connected by a adjectival article. For nominative these are 'i' for masculine and 'e' for feminine.

Nouns: first things to know

Albanian flag is very red and black (kuq e zi) and sq."Shqiponja ka dy kokat!" == en."The eagle has two heads!"

As you may notice the Albanian nouns have their article affixed to the end of the noun and not preceding it.

Albanian has 2 grammatical genders: masculine and feminine but worry not, nouns that end in a consonant are masculines and nouns ending in a vowel are feminines. Exceptions are if the noun clearly is of the other gender than the vowel/consonant rule would say.

Verbs: first things to know:

Albanian verbs have no infinite forms so all the dictionaries have them listed by the 1st person singular. This is handy for quickly learning to express what I do or what I would like to do.

Knowing the first things to know about nouns and adjectives now would be a good time to consider starting to play the Basic Albanian 1 on Memrise. Memrise programs your brain slightly differently than traditional methods, but hey, how harmful can it be?

Albanian has a lot of loan words but they come from a wide variety of languages including but not limited to English, Italian, French, Slavic, Germanic, Swedish, Jamaican etc.

Resources for learning Albanian

Books

• Colloquial Albanian (2012) is an excellent book for anglophones by Linda Mëniku and Hector Campos. It is concise and well organized. The learning curve gets steeper towards the end. Routledge, the publisher has kindly made audio for all text passages downloadable for free from the book's homepage.
• Discovering Albanian 1 (2011) is also by Linda Mëniku and Hector Campos and it consists of a textbook and workbook. As of 2018 there is no Discovering Albanian 2. The audio for the textbook can be accessed only via 2 CD's. Who has CD-players these days? Let's hope The University of Wisconsin Press wakes up and provides streaming and download at no extra charge.

Online texts

• Foreign Services Institute (FSI) (1965) .pdf book on Albanian. From this I can recommend the history introduction of this text aimed mostly for US armed forces personel though naturally the FSI's work helps also non-military government workers to gain knowledge too. Albanian language has changed so much since 1965 that this cannot really be used to learn contemporary albanian but the intro is good if you are a history and culture puff.

Learning games

• https://memrise.com is a spaced repetition flashcard and beyond language learning game and it has various memrises of varying quality. Memrise programs your brain slightly differently than traditional methods of vocabulary acquisition.

• Basic Albanian 1 (~170 things to learn) and Basic Albanian 2 (~210 things to learn) are of high quality, simple intros to the basic building blocks made by BaaS, an apparent memrise genius if you look at his productivity, scope and quality of his work.
• Discovering Albanian 1 (~1800 things to learn) is of high/professional quality and also with high quality, consistent and precise audio for practically all words and phrases to be learned. This memrise has over 1800 things to learn so it is the biggest available. The makers of this memrise have used sensible notation: For nouns indefinite and definite singular and indefinite plural are given etc. etc.