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The official language of modern Mongolia is a dialect called Khalkhan, a dialect that supposedly had its roots in the language of Ghengis Khan's original tribe. Spoken Mongolian, which is very different from written Mongolian, has evolved through three major periods. The earliest form of Mongolian is called Ancient Mongolian and was used up until the 12th century. The second period for Mongolian is called Middle Mongolian, found in use up to the 16th century. It is this version of Mongolian that gave birth to the English word "horde," which derived from the Middle Mongolian word "(h)ordu," meaning "camp." In its modern form, after dropping a few vowels and consonants, Khalkhan reads and sounds totally different from Middle Mongolian.
Mongolian is a challenging language to learn for someone whose native language is English, European, or Chinese mainly because its pronunciation differs so radically from the Indo-European languages and partly because some of the words are very long. Furthermore, the language used to speak Mongolian is very different from the language used to write Mongolian. English has only five vowels, each of which can be pronounced as either a long or short sound. Mongolian has fourteen vowels: seven short vowels and seven long vowels. This distinction between long and short vowels is critical, since their use is closely tied to the meaning of words: tos is "grease, oil," while toos is "dust." Consonants are also constrained as to their use. For example, "r" is never used to begin a word. The letter "f" is used only in foreign loan words and is often changed to "p." Pronunciation is not exceptionally difficult, since Mongolian uses sounds that are not unfamiliar to speakers of most other languages.
If it's any consolation, Mongolian grammar is much easier than English. There are only three tenses (past, present, and future) as opposed to the past, present, future and conditional tenses of English. Also, Mongolian has no prepositions and no articles to contend with, making sentence structure much simpler. Things do get a bit complicated when you try adding adjectives, however. All grammatical functions and relationships in Mongolian are formed by attaching one or more suffixes to the end of a word. For example, bolgoomj, or "care," can become bolgoomjtoi, an adjective meaning "careful," or even bolgoomjtoigoor, an adverb meaning "behaving carefully."
The word order in an English sentence is "subject-verb-object." In Mongolian, the order is a more direct, "subject-object-verb." To say, "I am going to the store" in Mongolian would be simply, "I store go." Mongolian grammar poses problems to speakers of most European languages and Chinese, but is much easier for students with a background in Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Manchu or similar languages.
One thing that confuses foreigners is the appearance of "double vowels," such as the "aa" in baatar. This only means that the vowel is stressed (accented) - it does not mean you pronounce the vowels as separate syllables such as ba-atar. You put the emphasis on the first syllable rather than the second.
A tricky sound is the "h" in Romanized Mongolian (often Romanized as "kh"). In the Cyrillic alphabet, this character is written as x and indicates a sound that does not exist in modern English. The sound survived in Old English and in Scottish English ("loch"), and can be found in German, Arabic, Turkish and a number of other modern languages. It sounds like the German pronunciation of "ch" in nacht, a bit like the sound you make when gargling or clearing your throat.
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