Mongolian is Easy: A Message From Our Founder

You want to learn Mongolian, huh?

You’ve probably heard stories of expats living in Mongolia for 16 years who still can’t speak the language. Sad but true. And you’ve almost certainly been told how painfully hard it learning Mongolian is.

Nope. That’s a lie.

My name is Amalia Rubin, and I am the director and founder of Bagan Mongolian Systems. When I say Mongolian is easy, I mean this from personal experience. When I first came to Mongolia, I didn't know anything other than "Sain baina uu." I had no access to teachers or classes and was basically thrown in head first.

I was conversant in one month. Nowhere near fluent and I sounded like a toddler, but I could get my point across. Less than one year living in Mongolia, I was able to do television interviews in Mongolian (and did several). Here’s the thing: I’m good at languages, but I am no genius. I nearly failed high school Spanish. French continues to be my nemesis. But Mongolian is easy!

There are two problems that convince people that Mongolian is hard

1) It has some sounds that don’t exist in most western languages, and one sound that is one of the rarest phonemes in the world: ɬ or ɮ. A lot of people give up when they hear Mongolian and it sounds, frankly, otherworldly to them.

2) There aren’t many good systems for teaching Mongolian. So unless you want to dive in head first with complete immersion with people who speak only Mongolian to you 100% of the time, there aren’t a lot of good, logical systems to teach the language. People give up and I can’t blame them. If I’d had to continue my formal Mongolian classes with the existing awful systems, I would have given up too!

The first problem is easy to deal with: phonetics is all about learning how to move your mouth in new ways. So that’s pretty easily solved.

As for the second? Well, that’s what this program is trying to address. This is a simple approach to Mongolian structure. I want you to believe, like I do, that Mongolian is one of the easiest, most fun languages to learn in the whole world!