Customer Reviews

Colloquial Slovene (Colloquial Series)

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Of all the language courses produced by Routledge, this one is probably one of the least helpful. This is all the more unfortunate as there are no other courses in Slovene available. Routledge has published some excellent Colloquial courses on Slavic languages, such as Colloquial Czech, Colloquial Russian and Colloquial Ukrainian. Unfortunately, all the Colloquial courses from the former Yugoslavia leave much to be asked for. Colloquial Slovene, Colloquial Croatian and Colloquial Serbian are all below the usual "Colloquial-standard".

For a total beginner looking for a phrasebook, this course might be of some use. It does include some basic expressions and words. However, if that is all you're looking for, you will be better served the Slovene phrasebook published by Berlitz. Not only is it much cheaper, it also includes a better pronunciation guide and far more vocabulary than this course.

If you're interested in acutally learning Slovene, this course won't be able to help you. I have listed the major problems you will face

Pronunciation
Slovene pronunciation is not easy. Stress can fall on any syllable of the word. Get it wrong, and you might say another word than the one you intended. Every phrasebook or course in Slovene I've come across shows the stressed syllable of each new word. Colloquial Slovene does no such thing, you have to guess.
Another problem is that the vowel "e" can be pronounced in different ways in Slovene. Again, phrasebooks such as the one published by Berlitz or courses published in German show the pronunciation of "e". In short, you cannot know how any word in this course is to be pronounced. The recordings will help you, but it's not always easy for beginners to pick out the right syllable to stress.

Grammar
The grammar part is what could set this course aside from a mere phrasebook. Unfortunately, the grammar part is very limited. The concept of aspect is almost totally excluded. If you speak any Slavic language, you will already know how crucial aspects are. If you're a beginner, know that you will never be able to speak a Slavic language without mastering this quite complicated feature. Ignoring the whole thing makes this course easier. It also renders it almost worthless for anyone interested in learning to speak Slovene. The conjugation of nouns is dealt with, but that's almost all there is. If you have access to Colloquial Czech (the grammar is very similar), pick it up and compare it's detailed and user-friendly approach to this course. It is astonishinh that two courses with such a variation in quality are published in the same series.

Vocaulary
Complete Colloquial Czech and you will know well over 2.000 words. Complete Colloquial Slovene, and you will not know even 900 words.

In short, this course is too little of everything. Too little help with the pronunciation, too little explanations of the grammar and way too few words.

Routledge, the publisher of this course, has also published a very extensive Slovene grammar, written by Peter Herrity. When the time comes for the next edition of Colloquial Slovene, I hope he is given the task of writing it, that he starts from scratch and takes his guidelines from Colloquial Czech rather than from this book.

This book is quite basic and should give the reader a good introduction to the slovene language, but it is only that. The small glossary at the end of the book helps with gender and conjugation, and most of the general rules for grammar are introduced. If you really want to learn Slovene, I suggest you start with this book, then get a dictionary like Komac's (which wont tell you anything about conjugation or gender) and finally an extensive grammar guide like Peter Harrity's book (which fills in the complex gaps left behind by the other two books). I suppose if you don't want to spend so much money, just buy this book, but do get the audio tapes so you can understand the pronunciation and get some good practice in.

The book is very readable, but contains exercises at the end of each lesson (with answers at the end of the book). It is set up much like a textbook and includes some penned illustrations to keep the mood light. Don't expect it to take you long to make it entirely through the book, though. Actually this book will get you through all of the essentials for a ski trip or a short holiday. Enjoy!

The book is well organised, well written and accessible. It covers all the basic vocabulary you need as a tourist and provides a good introduction to the language. It is largely jargon-free and you don't need to know any complicated grammatical terminology to use the book. The tapes/CDs are excellent - don't order the book without them if you want to get the most out of this teach-yourself course. The one big weakness - and it is a very big weakness - is that the book does not contain any information about word stress. Since there are no clear rules for word stress, the learner encounters many new words in the text (often not included on the tape) but without knowing how to pronounce them properly. Adding accents to denote the word stress would transform this from a good to an excellent book.

I'm sad to say that this course will be of no use to those wanting to learn Slovene. The aim of this review is to illustrate its shortcomings and suggest improvements that could be made.

Problem 1 - no accents
This problem alone is enough to render the book almost useless. In Slovene, any syllable of a word may be stressed. Get it wrong and you may end up saying a completely different word. This is especially evident in the case of the letter 'e', representing different sounds in Slovene. Apart from being stressed or unstressed, it can be an open e or a closed e. It might also be a schwa sound, the sound found in words such as English 'the'. In other words, how will you pronounce the common word 'vecer' (evening)? There are eight(!) options available... And what about the word 'svet'? Is it the Slovene word for 'holy' or for 'advice'? Almost all courses and books on Slovene make use of accents to indicate the pronunciation, since it is impossible to predict. The only two exceptions are this book and Teach Yourself Slovene by the same author. I never thought I'd say a language course in which you will have to guess the pronunciation of each and every word.

Problem 2 - Very limited vocabulary
The reviewer Gwilym mentioned how very limited the vocabulary of this course is compared to Colloquial Czech. The same goes for almost all the Colloquial courses on Slavic languages. Colloquial Czech, Colloquial Ukrainian, Colloquial Bulgarian, Colloquial Slovak, Colloquial Russian are all excellent courses with a well-suited vocabulary. Colloquial Serbian is decent enough. Only Colloquial Polish and Colloquial Croatian are a bit off the mark and then Colloquial Slovene that cannot even be compared to the other courses.

So only 1 star to this course, that star is for a decent (but not great) explanation of the grammar. Two stars off for the very limited vocabulary and two more for the lack of accents.

I'm glad that Routledge offers many excellent courses in Slavic languages and I can only hope that they will one day publish a Slovene course worhty of their reputation.

I was looking for a beginners language course to try to learn a few phrases and basic vocab for trip to Slovenia. I found few options and finally ordered this one, as it came with CDs so I could hear the language and it was described as a course for beginners. I've used other language programs with good success and was hopeful to add some basic Slovene to my repetoire. This program did not do it for me. For starters, there is no guidance in terms of phonetic pronounciation or syllabic stress. There are a number of exceptions to pronunication rules that would be easier to recognize and learn if there were phonetic pronounciation alongside the words. This is especially true when trying to figure out how to pronouce words with 3 or 4 consonants in a row. I thought listening to the CDs would help, but not for this beginner. Not only are the dialogues read at fast speed, but there is no slowing down to repeat common phrases so you can pick out distinct words and how to properly pronounce them. The CDs are more appropriate for someone who already is famililar with the language. Another thing that bugged me was that the book introduced vocabulary in their exercises that had not yet been presented. And it is very hard as a beginner to look an unknown word up in a dictionary since many parts of speech have different endings depending on gender, case, etc. So it is hard to match the word to a dictionary entry. This undermined the functionality of the exercises. In sum, this whole course is more designed as a Level 2 course. Disappointing for me.