mSiNi Newbie United States Joined 4628 days ago 12 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Slovak
| Message 1 of 9 17 March 2012 at 8:50pm | IP Logged |
Hello fellow language enthusiasts. I have a question about books for the Slovak language.
Does anyone have references to a book similar to Russian For Beginners for the Slovak
language? Or any other book reference for learning Slovak that has helped you would be
helpful. Thanks.
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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7147 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 2 of 9 17 March 2012 at 9:44pm | IP Logged |
Check out the following:
Help learning Slovak
Slovak materials?
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mSiNi Newbie United States Joined 4628 days ago 12 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Slovak
| Message 3 of 9 17 March 2012 at 10:45pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the links, but which one(s) do you recommend the most ? and are there any that
have short stories or dialogues for reading?
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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7147 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 4 of 9 18 March 2012 at 12:08am | IP Logged |
mSiNi wrote:
Thanks for the links, but which one(s) do you recommend the most ? |
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Chung wrote:
The best method depends on how you learn.
If you are comfortable about starting from scratch in the old-school (or older-school) way, then here are things that should be helpful.
"Beginning Slovak" (+ 8 tapes / CDs) (Oscar Swan)
"Slovak for You" (+ 2 tapes / CDs) (Ada Böhmerova)
"Colloquial Slovak" (+ 2 CDs) (James Naughton)
"Slovenčina ako cudzí jazyk - A" (+ 3 CDs) (Angela Zebegneyová, Anna Puzderová, Beáta Baková)
There's also an excellent set of online dictionaries in Slovak. I recommend them if you want to know the inflectional patterns.
The link for the dictionaries is: http://slovnik.juls.savba.sk/
[...]
"Beginning Slovak" can be bought from Amazon or Multilingual Books although the cost varies between $100 and $220. An option is to contact the author, Prof. Swan, and ask if he can help you to get it at a lower price. His email is swan@pitt.edu. This course is excellent and of all of the Slovak courses that I've used, I got the most out of this one.
"Slovak for You" can be found on Amazon, but the cost will vary as it's usually sold on Amazon Marketplace rather than by Amazon itself.
"Slovenčina ako cudzí jazyk - A" is new and obtainable only in Europe. You can order it from an online Slovak vendor such as martinus.sk or panorama.sk. |
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mSiNi wrote:
and are there any that have short stories or dialogues for reading? |
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All of these have dialogues for you to read or follow along with the CDs. There are also short passages in each of them that will give some reading practice. "Colloquial Slovak" which isn't mentioned above is also an option.
Look under "BOOKS" and "LINKS" in the Slovak Profile for more information on what you can use to learn Slovak.
If you want somewhat simple stuff to practice your understanding, check out the following:
Kubko a Maťko (cartoons of two Slovak peasants)
Rozprávky | KLASICI (folk or fairy tales in Slovak original or translated to Slovak.
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mSiNi Newbie United States Joined 4628 days ago 12 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Slovak
| Message 5 of 9 18 March 2012 at 12:17am | IP Logged |
Thanks
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mSiNi Newbie United States Joined 4628 days ago 12 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Slovak
| Message 6 of 9 18 March 2012 at 1:57am | IP Logged |
Sorry for another question, but would it still be worth it to buy this without the CD's
because there's now way i can get the money for the other.
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Slovak-Individual-Classroom-
Learner/dp/0893572144/ref=cm_cr_pr_sims_t
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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7147 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 7 of 9 18 March 2012 at 8:56am | IP Logged |
mSiNi wrote:
Sorry for another question, but would it still be worth it to buy this without the CD's
because there's now way i can get the money for the other.
http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Slovak-Individual-Classroom-
Learner/dp/0893572144/ref=cm_cr_pr_sims_t |
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It depends. If you're forced to choose one or the other, then get the textbook.
HOWEVER, the course's effectiveness is much lower when you got only one part. The beauty of that course is that it has LOTS of exercises with the CDs containing the dialogues and short narratives as well as between a third and half of each chapter's exercises (i.e. they're substitution or transformation drills). As I posted earlier, I got the most out of this course compared to the others that I used.
If you do get Swan's book without the audio, then you could still use the book and treat all of the exercises as ones to be written down. However you'll still need to train your brain to recognize Slovak in speech and produce Slovak sounds (be it spontaneously or by reading things aloud (or even "playing" Swan's dialogues in your mind).
For the audio-visual exposure, you could use Langmedia's set of videos and the transcripts in Slovak in Slovakia as a supplement to Swan's book. Another approach could be to start studying with just the online course ">Slovake and turn to Swan's course after having completed Slovake.eu
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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7147 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 8 of 9 19 March 2012 at 6:08am | IP Logged |
I forgot to include that the International Children's Digital Library has material too. In this case it has 8 children's books translated into Slovak and you can set up an onscreen dual-language reader by opening each of the English and Slovak versions of a book in its own browser window.
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