Introduction

This is a series of audio clips taken from a popular Mongolian sitcom designed to help learners understand spoken Mongolian.

One of the major difficulties of Mongolian for foreign learners is the gap between the written language and language in everyday use. What looks like a beautiful string of words on the page is often reduced to a brief syllable or two in spoken Mongolian. It's a bit like writing "What are you doing?" in English and pronouncing it "Wotcha doin'?" -- but worse, because both Mongolian scripts (Cyrillic and traditional) are too straightlaced to write something like "Wotcha doin'?" (although the Facebook generation may be changing all that).

This section is an attempt to get to the bottom of this dilemma by comparing the language spoken in an episode of the popular Mongolian sitcom Хөгжилтэй гэр бүл with the way it would be written down. The episode is broken up into bite-sized segments, each one consisting of a still to illustrate the situation, a tooltip providing background information, an audio clip, and a text showing the dialogue in written form. The written dialogue can be revealed or hidden at will, allowing users to first listen to what the speakers are saying and then look at the answer.

For beginners it may be discouraging to find such a gap between classroom Mongolian and what they hear in the street, but this section has been posted in the hope that it will be less discouraging than the frustration that most learners encounter when applying their hard-won language skills in real life.

This section is still in progress and more episodes will be added gradually.