Goal: Say what you would like to do.
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Two months of city life. I love Ulaanbaatar, its noise and its markets, but in the evenings I look at the bare hills behind the flats and wonder what lies beyond them.
At dinner I tell Nomin what I have been dreaming of: a horse, a ger, a night far from the traffic. It turns out that her grandmother lives exactly there.
| Mongolian | English |
|---|---|
| хөдөө | the countryside |
| хаашаа | where (to)? |
| мэдэх | to know |
| морь | horse |
| унах | to ride |
| гэр | ger (yurt); home |
| хонох | to spend the night |
| Архангай | Arkhangai, a province in central Mongolia |
| санаа | idea |
| тэнд | there |
| асуух | to ask; ааваас асуух to ask Dad |
To say what you would like to do, take the stem of the verb, add –маар, and finish with байна. The ending has the usual four shapes, chosen by the vowels of the stem.
| Stem vowels | Ending | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| а, у | –маар | явмаар (… to go), унамаар (… to ride), уумаар (… to drink) |
| о | –моор | очмоор (… to visit), хономоор (… to spend the night) |
| э, и, ү | –мээр | үзмээр (… to see), идмээр (… to eat), хиймээр (… to do) |
| ө | –мөөр | өгмөөр (… to give) |
–маар on its own is not a sentence: always add байна. Байна carries the tense, so the past is явмаар байсан "I wanted to go".
For a yes/no question, add уу after байна: Чи цай уумаар байна уу? "Would you like some tea?" With a question word, end with вэ, because байна ends in a vowel: Чи юу хиймээр байна вэ? "What would you like to do?"
The negative goes on –маар, never on байна: Би явмааргүй байна. "I don't want to go." As always, –гүй keeps its ү whatever the vowels of the verb.
Use –маар байна about yourself (би, бид) and to ask the person in front of you (чи, та). To report what somebody else wants, Mongolian prefers another construction, which you will learn in lesson 62.
Go deeper in the grammar guide: Wanting and needing
For people in Ulaanbaatar, everything outside the capital is хөдөө, the countryside, even a provincial town. Like "home" in "go home", хөдөө needs no ending to show the direction: хөдөө явах "to go to the countryside". Many city families still go back to their relatives' herds every summer.
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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