Goal: Tell the plot of a film.
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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 keepWatching a Mongolian film
Nomin chose the film tonight: a story filmed in the Gobi, about a herding family and a mother camel who will not accept her newborn calf. I thought I would watch it for the landscapes. I watched it with a handkerchief.
Afterwards Saraa asked me what it was about, and I tried to tell the whole plot in Mongolian. I discovered that a story needs two kinds of verb: one for what was going on, and one for what happened.
| Mongolian | English |
|---|---|
| малчин айл | herding family |
| ингэ | female camel, mother camel |
| ботго | camel calf |
| төллөх | to give birth (of animals) |
| голох | to reject (of a mother animal: ботгоо голох) |
| хөхүүлэх | to suckle, to let suckle |
| хөөрхий | poor thing |
| гэтэл | but then (in a story) |
| айлынхан | the family, the members of a household |
| явуулах | to send |
| нулимс | tears |
| урсах | to flow, to run |
| уйлах | to cry |
| уйлуулах | to make (someone) cry |
Every plot has a background, what was going on and what people used to do, and a line of events, what happened next. Mongolian gives each its own forms.
| Form | Job in the story | From the dialogue |
|---|---|---|
| –даг байсан | background habit: "used to, would" | Тэд тэмээ малладаг байсан. |
| –ж байсан | background in progress: "was doing" | Нулимс нь урсаж байсан. |
| –сан | the events, one by one | Ингэ ботгоо голсон. |
| –аад, –ж | events chained together | Хөгжимчин ирээд … |
| –жээ | the storyteller's past (tales, books) | Эрт урьд цагт … байжээ. |
Start with one or two sentences in –даг байсан: who the people are and how they lived. Then switch to –сан for each event, and link events that follow each other with –аад. Go back to –ж байсан whenever you stop to describe a moment: Ингэ уйлж, нулимс нь урсаж байсан.
гэтэл announces the unexpected, like English "but then". It is the word storytellers use at the moment the problem begins, and listeners hear it as a signal to pay attention.
When you retell a film in conversation, –сан is right. A written tale, or a grandparent telling an old story, uses –жээ (lesson 136) and often opens with эрт урьд цагт, "long, long ago":
The causative –уул (lesson 131) turns a feeling into something done to you: уйлах (to cry) gives уйлуулах (to make someone cry). Its partner for laughter is инээлгэх, to make someone laugh.
Go deeper in the grammar guide: The four Mongolian pasts · Mongolian converbs
The film is real. "The Story of the Weeping Camel" (2003), made in the Gobi by the Mongolian director Byambasuren Davaa with Luigi Falorni, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary.
So is the custom it shows. When a mother animal rejects her young, herders may sing a slow coaxing song to her, sometimes with the morin khuur, until she accepts it. Many Mongolians say they have seen a camel weep.
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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