savannahm Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5820 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: French
| Message 1 of 5 19 December 2008 at 8:09pm | IP Logged |
I just found out that I'm going to be in Slovenia this summer. Finding resources on the Slovenian language is even harder than other Slavic languages! Does anyone know any good resources for learning Slovene?
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rlf1810 Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6338 days ago 122 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English*, German, Slovak
| Message 2 of 5 20 December 2008 at 8:45am | IP Logged |
There is a Teach Yourself course for Slovene, if you like that series. Otherwise I really don't know of anything. Resources must be very scarce indeed. Good luck with your search.
-Robert
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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 3 of 5 20 December 2008 at 11:04am | IP Logged |
Zdravo,
The first stop should be UCLA's site of language-learning materials. Select "Slovenian" in the pull-down menu and see what has been published (according UCLA).
Teach Yourself Slovenian is pretty poor and skimpy - I speak from experience. Unfortunately, Colloquial Slovenian is equally poor. It doesn't help that both courses are created by the same author, Andrea Albretti. I'm sure that she knows Slovenian, but her creations are among the poorest within the Teach Yourself and Colloquial series. Look up these courses on Amazon and read some of the reviews - they're not very encouraging.
Unforutnately, Hippocrene's dictionary and phrasebook in Slovenian is the only widely-available hard-copy dictionary. It suffers from the usual flaws of most dictionaries published by Hippocrene in that it is small and is little more than a word-list. The phrasebook-section is a little more handy, but that's little consolation if you want a serious dictionary for studying.
There is an online reference manual to Slovenian grammar at this website:
http://www.seelrc.org/projects/grammars.ptml
Marc Greenberg (the author of this online grammar) is a specialist on Slovenian linguistics and teaches at the University of Kansas. Perhaps you can send an email to him and find out if he can help you find some more Slovenian resources.
His webpage is at:
http://www2.ku.edu/~slavic/greenberg.shtml
There is an online Slovenian phrasebook that I found to be useful before preparing for a trip to Slovenia. It also has a link to a list of dictionaries and courses in Slovenian.
The online-phrasebook is at:
http://www.ff.uni-lj.si/publikacije/sft/
Srečno!
Chung
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savannahm Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5820 days ago 4 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: French
| Message 4 of 5 20 December 2008 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
Well, it's not looking very encouraging, but it's definitely a start. I'm thinking I'll get one of the Albretti courses, supplement it with a grammar and dictionary, and see how far I can get. Thanks so much for giving me somewhere to start from!
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fatboy85 Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 6 posts - 7 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, French Studies: Slovenian
| Message 5 of 5 09 January 2009 at 10:33am | IP Logged |
Resources for Slovene are extremely thin on the ground, which is hardly surprising considering the size of the country. The Albretti courses aren't too hot and the Colloquial book is riddled with mistakes. I'm not well enough aquainted with TY to tell you if its any better. The only comprehensive item available is Peter Herrity's grammar, although it's not for the faint hearted and probably not what you want as a beginner! Good luck anyway as apeaking Slovene gets you obscure language kudos.
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