Resources and questions about Slovene

[CarlyD]

Short version: I just mostly want to be able to pronounce Slovenian personal names and names of cities.

I'm currently learning German, but my genealogy research has taken me to south-eastern Slovenia. My great-grandparents came from Gottschee (Austrian Empire, now in Slovenia) and spoke German. I recently found that my great-grandfather was actually Slovenian who switched to speaking German only when he married a Gottschee girl.

I'm finding many of the research database sites have an option to view them in Slovene or German (sometimes English) and I can build a vocabulary of words I need in Slovene for genealogy--and many are similar to Croatian words I remember from college Adult Ed Croatian I.

But how to pronounce them? I want to throw out all the extra 'j's and pronounce them like Croatian. I went to Amazon and the few books available (for less than $50) had fairly bad reviews. I went to multiple websites and in the pronunciation part it will give a letter, an example Slovene word then translate the word to English with nothing there to say how it's pronounced. I even signed up for several Memrise Slovene classes and they were all just written, no audio.

And the cheerful--"there's 50 different dialects in Slovenia and most people can't understand other people anyway"--doesn't help.

Does anyone here know both Croatian and Slovene and can tell me how far apart the pronunciation is? Or know of a resource for beginning Slovene that would teach me correct pronunciation?

[Speakeasy]

While I cannot offer any direct advice, I did notice that this type of question has come up on the HTLAL. Here are a couple of links:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=40798&PN=1

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6491&PN=1

In the event that you should decide to purchase the Routledge Colloquial Slovenian course, please note that the audio recordings are now "freely available". That is to say, the publisher no longer offers the accompanying CDs for sale, has rendered the audio recordings freely available and, in order to recover their investment in the recordings, has raised the prices of the course books. Here is the link: http://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/colloquial/default.php#languages

Finally, given your limited goals, the following resources might be useful:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=learn+to+speak+slovene+free&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-CA:IE-SearchBox&ie=&oe=&gfe_rd=cr&ei=9cVuVsKoI-qh8wec_oC4BQ

[daegga]

Slovene pronunciation cannot be directly inferred from the spelling. The stress could be anywhere, and vowels can be either open or close without distinction in writing (e could also be a shwa). But Croatian pronunciation is a good first approximation.
You can use this defining dictionary to get a scientific transcription of the lemma in question, which is kind of phonetic if you can get accustomed to it.
Wikipedia has a short description of the diacritics used for this transcription: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovene_l ... diacritics

One notable difference from Croatian is the pronunciation of <v> and <l>. Both can be pronounced either as expected, or as a bilabial approximant (much like English <w>). As a rule of thumb: when the consonant is succeeded by a vowel, use the consonant, otherwise the approximant. Also, <l> is usually not velarized, ie. use "light" l, not "dark" l.