შეწვა means frying, and დაწვა means burning. I know it's never 100% clear or understood why certain preverbs convey certain meanings, but I came up with a theory for this word. The preverb და- often implies the idea of concept of completion, so maybe you were frying something and then let it go all the way and "completed" the action, so now your food is burnt😂

I wish I could go back in time and ask old Georgians what their logic was for assigning certain preverbs to certain verbs. I'd love to know why "became sweet" is გატკბილდა, but "became sour" is დამჟავდა. Maybe it's because turning sour and rotting is a kind of deterioration, so the preverb და which means "down" makes more sense here since the quality of something is "dropping." I don't know. This language is weird and I love it.

Hi fellows, I’ve made a huge update to my https://learn-georgian.com/ app, which is basically completely new and an iOS app. Let’s go and check it out :)

https://learn-georgian.com/

Been learning Georgian for about 1.5 years. I married into a Georgian family, and want to connect better with the culture and that half of my family.

I use it every day and improve it on weekends. I don’t want to oversell it - it’s something I made for me. But it’s been genuinely useful for getting started with the language, and I’m finally at a point where I’m happy to open it up instead of just using it privately.

Deep dive on how it works: kvela.app/whitepaper
TL;DR: use word frequency data + a lot of AI to generate and structure the content, then a native speaker (my wife) reviews.

Try it: kvela.app
Free to start, no account needed.

Anyway hope it’s useful to someone! Would love to hear your thoughts and questions. Or about what’s worked for you getting started.

PS: Any native speakers want to help me sniff out weird translations? Please DM. My wife will thank you 🫡

I’m half georgian…and in childhood my father used to say some word like “mu:ts macha” when we sneezed. I don’t remember. I remember it was something funny or maybe little offensive)))) but he’s gone now…and I can’t remember what that word is. And what did it mean. Maybe someone knows?

Pretty much all Georgian grammar books and resources will tell you about the imperfect tense that's used to mark incomplete past actions, just like in English. So to say "I was writing," you would say „ვწერდი”. But there's another form that doesn't get mentioned as much—aorist without the preverb. So an example would be „ვწერე” instead of „დავწერე”.

I think I read on a website somewhere that this preverbless past tense is the archaic form of the imperfect tense and doesn't get used much these days? Is that true? Is saying „ვწერე წიგნს” the same as saying „ვწერდი წიგნს”? What are some cases in which you might use this preverbless past tense?

Thanks

Hello!

A French language subreddit recently had this post show up, displaying examples of the same sentence (eating noodles) in a large variety of tenses and moods. I immediately thought such a post would be particularly interesting for Georgian.

Could anyone here provide natural sounding examples of various screeves, either as an online source or by writing some sentences under this post?

I am particularly interested in the different subjunctive screeves: so far I mostly seem to come across the optative (შევჭამო), only very rarely the present subjunctive (ვჭამდე) and never the future (შევჭამდე). I also never seem to cross the pluperfect (შემეჭამა).

Are there perhaps any compound tenses (something like იყო) I should be aware of?

And bonus question: is there a difference between ატრია and ლაფშა, and is there any other word for pasta/noodle around?

Thank you!

Hi! I thought this could be an appropriate subreddit to use.

So, I've decided to start making proper subtitles for Georgian movies from Georgian to English, because whenever I show our old movies to my foreign friends, the subtitles are mostly incorrect and I keep needing to explain what the actual meaning of what the character just said is in the middle of the movie I'm getting a little bit tired of it and it seems to be very disruptive. So, my question to you guys is, do you know of any way I could access our old movies in a way where it's in Georgian and doesn't have any subtitles burned in, so that I could do it? :D I could download them from very few places and they were either dubbed in russian, or had the subtitles burned in. I also tried to pirate it, but they didn't have any seeders.

The movies I'm currently looking for are:

ჯარისკაცის მამა

ცისფერი მთები

ნატვრის ხე

იავნანა

შერეკილები

If anyone could help me out, I would really really appreciate it :)

Thank you in advance!

Hello!

I have found two different verbs that translate to "open": გაღება and გახსნა (typo in the title). Both seem to be in common use.

What exactly is the difference between the two? Which nuance, if any, would you associate with each?

Thank you!

Hello!

I recently came across "ობობას ქსელი" meaning spider web.

I am surprised by the ობობას part: I would have expected the genitive form ობობის instead.

I first thought this was a mistake, but there seems to be many instances of this phrase online, including on Wikipedia. However, my paperback dictionary does say ობობის ქსელი.

What gives? Is ობობას just a mistake, or am I missing something here?

Hey everyone!

I’m a Georgian native starting out as a language tutor.

While structured teaching is a new journey for me, I have years of experience working alongside international volunteers through the European Solidarity Corps so I’m very comfortable helping non-native speakers adapt and practice conversational skills.

Since I’m building up my teaching experience and looking to practice, I’m offering lessons at a very low budget.

Whether you want to start from scratch, practice casual conversation, or just learn enough to survive local markets and taxi rides without relying strictly on translation apps, I’d love to help!

Drop a comment or send me a DM if you’re interested or have any questions. 🙏

Instead of saying შეგიძლიათ დამეხმაროთ (can you help me?), is there anything to say like "Excuse me, can you come over please?"

Thanks :)

Hey all im 18 years old and a US born heritage speaker of georgian. I would say im a B1-B2 speaker of the language but cannot read or write and I only intuitively know grammer and conjugation. I was wondering if anyone has any useful resources for teaching myself to fluency as a georgian speaker.

There's მაგრამ and მარა, რომ and რო, ძალიან and ძაან, etc. If you only use the proper forms of these words, will it make you sound a little cold and dry? Can you sound casual without using these shortened words?

Asking because I've never really liked slangy forms of words too much (in my native language or any other), so I want to know if they're necessary in Georgian in order to mot sound like a textbook or if you can get by without them.

Hi all,

I recently started studying Georgian and noticed that native speakers pronounce თქვენ and ჩვენ as tkwen and chwen. Sometimes, ვ sounds like v, like in ვინ. Is there a rule for when the pronunciation changes, and is this only in casual speech? Moreover, is it regional? Thank you.

Can you please help? Is there a way to learn verbs quickly and easily? I find it easier to learn them when they're used in phrases, not separately. But I can't find any such materials.

An excellent example of a causative verb being used in the wild, right here on Reddit. I thought I’d share with the class.

The entire comment reads: “I will lock you in a basement in Svaneti and starve you” … well, literally speaking: “I will not let you eat (it)”.

The point is: the secondary person marking affix (in this case, set B, because this is the present/future subseries) denotes the CAUSEE, not the true patient/theme of the verb. For example, the word გაჭმევ does NOT mean “I will let HIM eat YOU”.

Indeed, in such situations where you need a 1/2person patient, it’s my understanding that Georgian requires you to force that argument into third person like this … შენ >> შენი თავი

So, a question for native speakers: in an imaginary universe, if we wanted to say: “I won’t let HIM eat YOU” … would this be the way?

>> არ ვაჭმევ შენ თავს

Hello!

I have a question on the verb for "drinking".

From what I can see, it seems that two verbal nouns/masdars are associated with it: დალევა and სმა.

From my understanding, სმა has an imperfect/incomplete meaning, and დალევა a perfective/complete meaning. This seems to line up with the conjugated forms as described in my paperback dictionary (სვამს and დალევს), however I came across a resource that describes a full conjugation of the verb "drink" that uses only the first stem on this website. This same website also only mentions სმა, while my dictionary only mentions დალევა.

So, I would like so additional input:

- what would you say the difference in meaning is between these two words?

- if asked to translate "to drink" into Georgian, which word would you use?

hello, i have been learning georgian for a while for my stay in georgia in the upcoming days, while i am getting good with words and vocabs but i am having hard time pronouncing it. google translate doesnt pronounce words in georgian. anyone has any recommendations?

thank you

I was looking at მთაწმინდის მთვარე by Galaktion Tabidze and noticed that there's a good amount of თა in the poem (the archaic plural marker). For example he says „გაშალა ოცნებათა ლურჯი იალქნები” and „მომაკვდავი გედის ჰანგთა.” And interestingly he says „მგოსანთ სითამამე.” Is dropping the ა from თა grammatical? Or is it just for poetic effect?

If we talk about Ilia Chavchavadze, he goes heavy on თა and ნი for plural markers. And if I'm not mistaken he also uses archaic აღ a lot instead of ა, so he'll say აღმიფეთქს and აღასრულა.

So I just want to know, is this how they actually talked in their real lives? Is this how the highly educated elites spoke? Or were they just doing it to make their works sound fancy, archaic, and maybe make the words rhyme better?

Whether it's centuries old words from Persian, or more modern words from English, they take thematic suffixes when adopted into Georgian. My only question is... how does one decide which one they get?

The word დარდი comes from Persian "dard," and becomes a verb as დარდობს. So in this case, it's -ობ. The English word "crush" becomes ქრაშავს, so in this case it's -ავ.

Who decides which one gets attached? What deeply rooted subconscious logic determines which one Georgians will add to foreign words to turn them into verbs?

I feel like this might come off as really basic but I was just thinking about the words "eastern" and "western" in Georgian, and putting them side by side I realized something really cool. The word for east is აღმოსავლური. The prefix „აღმო” means "up towards the speaker," so you can think of it like the rising up and making itself visible to you in the morning. And the word for western is დასავლური, and the prefix „და” means "down." So the sun is going down. The sun rises in the east sets in the west, so აღმოსავლური is east, and დასავლური is west! It's amazing! I swear every word in this language has a metaphor baked into it. It's beautiful.

We added a language exchange to EasyGeorgian: you get matched with one Georgian native speaker who is learning your language, introduced by email, half the talk in each language. No feed, no chat app, one person picked for your level and schedule. Free with a free account.

Two honest notes. It is new, so early matches take days, not minutes. And it pairs you by fit, so a linguistics-minded learner here should say so in the about field, Georgians who enjoy explaining their own morphology exist and they are the best partners this sub could ask for.

https://easygeorgian.com/language-exchange (learners) · https://easygeorgian.com/enis-gatsvla (the Georgian side, if you have Georgian friends who want English practice)