Goal: Imagine unreal situations.
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Now hear it and say it
This written course teaches you to read and write. The LIMBA audio course makes you speak: 24 lessons of 12 to 15 minutes, recorded with a native speaker. You listen, you repeat, you answer — the perfect partner for these pages.
Download the Mongolian audio course24 audio lessons · MP3 · yours to keepIf I had stayed in the Gobi…
Sometimes, in the noise of Ulaanbaatar, I close my eyes and I am back in the Gobi. If I had stayed with Dorj's family, I would have learned to milk camels. If we had had one more day, I would have climbed the Singing Dunes at sunrise.
Nomin says I am becoming a real dreamer. In Mongolian these "if only" sentences have their own shape: –сан бол … –х байсан.
| Mongolian | English |
|---|---|
| хэрвээ | if (an optional signpost at the start) |
| үлдэх | to stay, to remain |
| саах | to milk |
| найз болох | to become friends |
| залуу | young |
| одоо ч | still, even now |
| харамсах | to regret |
| харамсалтай нь | unfortunately |
| явуулах | to send |
Lesson 93 gave you the real condition in –вал: something that may still happen.
For something that did not happen, or that is not true, Mongolian uses a different pattern: –сан бол … –х байсан.
| Part | Form | English |
|---|---|---|
| the condition | verb in –сан + бол | if … had … / if … were … |
| the result | verb in –х + байсан | would (have) … |
Хэрвээ at the start is optional, as it is with –вал. The word that makes the condition is бол, standing after the –сан form.
Харамсах means "to regret, to be sorry about something". Харамсалтай нь at the start of a sentence means "unfortunately".
Do not use –сан бол for things that can still happen. For those, keep –вал and its negative –хгүй бол:
Go deeper in the grammar guide: The Mongolian conditional · Saying no in Mongolian · The four Mongolian pasts
When something has gone wrong and cannot be changed, Mongolians often shrug and say Яах вэ дээ ("What can you do?"), then move on. Regrets are said softly, with a даа at the end: Явах байсан даа ("I would have gone, you know"). And when the regret is a small one, a friend will simply answer Зүгээр дээ ("It's all right").
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Lesson done? Train your ear
This written course teaches you to read and write. The LIMBA audio course makes you speak: 24 lessons of 12 to 15 minutes, recorded with a native speaker. You listen, you repeat, you answer — the perfect partner for these pages.
Download the Mongolian audio course24 audio lessons · MP3 · yours to keep