In the end of December I've embarked in this crazy mission of learning Slovene.
Difficulties:
- - scarcity of learning material for any level
- unnecessarily complicated grammar, highly inflected, six cases on three genders and three numbers (singular, plural and dual), a lot of irregularities. I don't know other slavic languages, but I think this is not an easy one. For sure not easier than Serbo-Croation.
- lots of dialects, it seems that virtually nobody really speaks the "official" language
- young Slovenes speak English really good
Advantages:
- - I live near the border, I go to Slovenia regularly I have friends there
- The phonetic is quite easy. Most of the sounds are the same as in Italian. To me, it actually sounds as if an Italian is speaking a slavic language. This makes it also less exotic though
- It's a minority language in Trieste, so there is a library and a bookstore
Learning material:
Découvrir et pratiquer le slovène: this is a French course, Assimil style. It's more or less 100 dialogues with translation and audio, along with some grammar explanation. Unfortunately, it's a Flash based application, so it doesn't work anymore
BUT I gathered all the dialogues and audio files from the program folders and arranged in a more accessible way. It took some time but... I think this is the best available resource. In case you need it, I can send it to you.I use a routine that I got from an old post by Luca Lampariello (which I can't find anymore):
Day one: I listen to dialogue A and try to write down what I understand, then check if it's correct. I try to understand the meaning and I read the grammar notes.
Day two: I translate dialogue A to my mother tongue using a dictionary, and than check if it's correct. Then I listen to dialogue B and do the same as day one - dictation.
Day three: I translate dialogue A back to Slovene. I translate dialogue B to my mother tongue. I listen to dialogue C and do the dictation.
And so on. I also regularly listen to the audio files in my free time and sometimes do shadowing.
Colloquial Slovene: this is also a good resource, but there are only 50 dialogues. I use it the same way as the French course, only when I have spare time and I want to do some more practice. The dialogues are also a bit more fast and difficult to understand.
Qlango: it's a flashcard app, the best one for Slovene (there is no much choice anyway
). I like the fact that you only translate from English to Slovene and not vice-versa. I also like that it shows you over and over the same flashcard until you can make it with no hints. Unfortunately, there are no audio nor accents in the text."Anna in Slovenia" and "ABCslovene" have some very good grammar explanations.
Peter Herrity's "Slovene: A Comprehensive Grammar", not very readable, but comprehensive indeed
https://besana.amebis.si/pregibanje/ for inflections
https://www.termania.net/ and https://it.pons.com/traduzione/italiano-sloveno, online dictionaries
https://ebralec.si/branje/ speech synthesizer
My notebook:
I've completed 40 lessons out of 100 from "Découvrir..." so far. I can have very basic conversations over the phone and on whatsapp, which is very satisfying.
I used Lang-8 a lot for German and French, it's a pity I don't get corrections for Slovene.