Learning Albanian

Welcome to Learning Albanian.

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 said to be derived from the base word sq.'shqiponja' == en."the eagle".

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

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

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 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.

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.

https://memrise.com has Albanian vocabulary

• 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.

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.

• This memrise of the Discovering Albanian 1 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.