Teach Yourself Slovene Book/CD Pack - Andrea Albretti

Not wanting to be the traditional helpless British property owner abroad, I have now embarked upon the arduous task of learning the Slovene language. Predictably my local college doesn't offer any Slovene classes and my enquiries so far haven't been able to find anyone offering private lessons. I've always considered languages my 'thing' though so I was quite confident that I could give myself a good start by using a 'Teach Yourself' programme. I ...
...Spanish and Italian and conversational Russian, the last three also being self taught.

A few things you need to know about Slovene…..

It's a really difficult language to learn. If you know any foreign languages, think of all the things about them that are different to English. The use of cases in German, the absence of the definite article in Russian, the use of the masculine, feminine and neuter in so many languages…Slovene ... more

Not wanting to be the traditional helpless British property owner abroad, I have now embarked upon the arduous task of learning the Slovene language. Predictably my local college doesn't offer any Slovene classes and my enquiries so far haven't been able to find anyone offering private lessons. I've always considered languages my 'thing' though so I was quite confident that I could give myself a good start by using a 'Teach Yourself' programme. I studied French at University, have A Level German and passable Spanish and Italian and conversational Russian, the last three also being self taught.

A few things you need to know about Slovene…..

It's a really difficult language to learn. If you know any foreign languages, think of all the things about them that are different to English. The use of cases in German, the absence of the definite article in Russian, the use of the masculine, feminine and neuter in so many languages…Slovene uses all of these and more.
Slovene uses cases I had never heard of: I knew from learning German about the dative and the accusative, etc but Slovene has a case called the instrumental, something rarely found in other languages. Worst of all it uses not only the singular and the plural but it also has a dual form so you must change the words slightly for we - just us two - and we - ten of us. This used to be common but is now considered archaic usage - Slovene is one of only a handful of languages that still use this.

Slovene is a highly inflected language: this means that most words decline according to their function within the sentence. This, in turn, means that you have to learn the hard way from the beginning, there's no way to ease yourself into this. Depending on whether something or someone is the subject or object the word changes slightly and any adjective you use to describe it changes as well. In short, it's a nightmare.

It's the smallest official language in the EU - that is, the least commonly used language that is the official language of its country (as opposed to, say, Catalan which is spoken by more people but isn't the chief language of that country, Spain).

Given that people generally learn new languages that will open doors for them, not many people go out to learn Slovene. Spanish or Russian will be useful in places other than Spain or Russia; Japanese or Chinese are useful languages for international business. Slovene is spoken by less than three million people and many of them also speak English, Italian or German. Most also speak or at least understand Serbo-Croat. They are a nation of polyglots and they put the British to shame.

The upshot of this is that, unlike you find with French, German or Spanish, the choice of Slovene learning programmes is small. The same names crop up time and again and once you trawl through them you can discount some as just being purely grammatical reference books, others as just being a dictionary and another as colloquial Slovene only.

"Teach Yourself Slovene" was the only learning programme I could find. You can buy the book, the CD or both together. I was happy enough to settle for this because I had used a Russian edition from the same publisher with some success and I bought the CD and book combination which comes in a chunky plastic case.

On first glance I thought the book was a bit thin considering that it has a short introduction on the history of Slovenia and the events that led to independence, a double vocabulary section (English - Slovene, Slovene - English), several pages covering the answers to the short tests at the end of each chapter and a fair few illustrations.

The course is divided into thirteen chapters

How are things? - In this chapter you learn how to greet people, how to introduce yourself and others, how to address different people

Welcome! - How to say where you come from, what job you do, what languages you speak, the numbers to one to ten

Have a good weekend! - How to make travel enquiries and book tickets, the numbers from eleven upwards, expressions of time and how much things cost

Left or right - Giving and asking for directions, using the imperative form and using 'can' and 'must'

I have a new telephone number! - Carrying out transactions at the bank and post office, speaking to people on the telephone, using ordinal numbers, adverbs, colours

When? At 7 p.m. - Asking for and telling the time, using the past tense, how to write notes and simple letters, saying how many times something happened

Whatever will be will be - Saying you like something or like doing something; talking about things that will happen in the future; how to ask someone how he or she is feeling and how to say how you feel; the dative case

How may I help you? - Doing your shopping; using expressions relating to needs and desire; the genitive case; expressing 'would'

Come and see us! - Expressing a hypothesis (sounds useful doesn't it!); how to accept or refuse an invitation; describing you house or flat and rooms in it; using the perfect and imperfect tenses; using possessive adjectives

Bon Appetit! - How to order a meal in a restaurant; finding a good place to eat; following a recipe in Slovene; the instrumental case

What will the weather be like tomorrow? - More words and phrases relating to weather including reading and understanding weather forecasts; using impersonal expressions; points of the compass; the locative case

I don't feel well - talking about illnesses and ailments; managing when you don't feel well; comparing things; using verbs with prefixes
Let's go for a trip! - How to book a hotel room; checking into a hotel; buying clothes; using the passive construction

There are little icons beside the sections that correspond with dialogues on the CD. The CD has some dialogues that are intended to be listened to as you read the text and others that stand alone and give you an opportunity to answer in the spaces provided.

With this kind of programme you really do need to be quite disciplined because you don't get any feedback so you don't know whether you have really grasped what is being taught. The programme can only offer limited examples so it doesn't take long to cover each section. Each chapter is relatively short and with the small number of exercises to work through there is the risk that students may try to cover too much at once.

I have added my own memorising exercises to make sure I have learned all the irregular verbs and things like the declensions for the different cases. This involves covering up the book and re-writing the cases again and again until I know them. It sounds tedious but it works for me.

It's hard to say whether the author has managed to make the course content useful and relevant to the majority of learners. Things like asking for directions will always be useful but some things are pretty dated or not that useful at all; for example, in the section on banking travellers cheques are mentioned but few people use travellers cheques these days and Slovenia is somewhere they really aren't needed. It would have been more useful to ask about ATM withdrawals perhaps.

I realise it's hard to please everyone; after all people have different reasons for learning the language - buying a property, visiting on business, arriving as an exchange student - but who really needs to translate a passage on aubergines at this point in their learning?
One thing that I find particularly frustrating is that the dual construction is not looked at in this book, only its existence is briefly skirted over at the beginning of the course. Since I'll be more often than not be speaking on behalf of myself and my partner, the dual construction is one I should really know because I could be using it all the time.

Another problem I have encountered is the difference between the voices used for the dialogues and those of the people I talk to when in Slovenia. The blurb on the package says that native speakers have been used to voice the dialogues but they don't sound like anyone I know in Slovenia; the speakers in the dialogue sound like very well spoken English people speaking Slovene!

The vocabulary is limited; I would have expected to have been introduced to more words by the end of the programme. I found that words I have learned by this stage in other languages had not appeared. Another problem was that the two vocabulary sections were not mirror images so it wasn't possible to look up all the words used in the programme. If you forget the meaning of a word you sometimes have to trawl back through the previous chapters to find out what it means if it doesn't appear in the alphabetical vocabulary lists.

Overall I would say that while I have had some success this has been with a lot of hard work and I don't think I'd have been able to have got so far if I hadn't already studied some foreign languages. The blurb says that the programme is suitable for people with no experience of learning languages but I would say that this is a little ambitious.

The author is a former teacher of Slovene at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London and I hope her students there fared better with direct teaching.

With the use of an excellent dictionary I have been able to supplement the examples given and almost create my own addendum to the course that encompasses the situations that I need to speak Slovene for and this is vital because so much of the course is irrelevant to my personal needs.

I now find that I can read basic newspaper articles, understand brief radio news bulletins and can keep up with daytime radio DJs on the local stations. Now when people ask me questions at the bus stop I no longer have to smile apologetically and say "England" - I can usually answer their questions and on the odd occasion I can't answer them I can say "I don't speak Slovene. I am English". Of course the clever old Slovenians just ask me again in English making me feel even more guilty about my linguistic shortcomings!

This programme is not Slovene but its all there is and until another programme appears it is my constant companion.

Currently available from Amazon priced £16.99 (RRP £26.99)
Na svidenje in havla! (Thanks and goodbye!) 

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