Talk:Slovenian phrasebook

Pronunciation

The pronunciation guide in this phrasebook contridicts the pronunciations written in brackets within phrases themselves. It says "a" is pronounced "u" like in "mum" yet says the word "hvala" (thank you) to be pronounced as (HVAH-lah). This isn't the only place, it is thoughout the text. The pronunciations aren't the only thing that is off, the entire phrasebook is a mess. Sorry to criticise, and well done to the person/s who created it, but it needs sorting; I'll help in anyway I can but my knowledge of the language ends beyond knowing where it is spoken.

Yeah, Slovene vowels are a mess. I've fixed the weird a-as-in-mum thing (which doesn't sync with Wikipedia or my own experiences), but unfortunately I, too, am entirely unqualified to fix the rest of the guide... (WT-en) Jpatokal 09:07, 4 February 2007 (EST)

OK. I tried fixing phrasebook pronunciations. Not quite sure I got the 'englification' system right everywhere, but stresses were often on wrong syllables. In some cases this isn't a problem, as even we stress different syllables of some words in different dialects. In other cases it might be a problem. ie. 'govori':

- GOH-voh-ree - speeches (noun)

- goh-VOH-ree - speak! (as a request to a person)

- goh-voh-REE - (he/she/it) speaks (verb, present time, 3rd person singular)

alphabet

hm.. As Slovenian is my mother tongue, I can easily say that Slovenian does not have consonant "šč". So one please correct this. Slovenian consonants are: b, c, č, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, š, t, v, z, ž.

Slovenian is not phonemic: the sound of "šč" is not the same as saying "š+č". (WT-en) Jpatokal 23:59, 2 March 2007 (EST)

I'm native. They sound like š+č to me in ie. peščina, ščinkavec, slovenščina. One can definitely hear two sounds.

No reply, and http://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soglasnik doesn't list šč, so deleted (and added dž).

'o' is usually not pronounced as in 'hot', but more often like in 'hawk' or 'caught'. To make it confusing, we don't write signs on it, so "kosa", can be pronounced as kôsa and kósa (one meaning a sycle, the other 2 members of some bird species)

Late to the party. It's a bit more complicated as Slovene has more phonems than graphems. Thus dž is a phonem, but not a graphem (contrary to what Serbocroatian languages have character đ). 'šč' is not a phonem either. I believe a list of phonems would be better but we're still missing a few vowels and a few variants of different consonant pronounciations (namely l and w).--A09 (talk) 13:02, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

External links

• 100 M words Corpus of Slovenian
• The Slovenian Language Technologies Society
• Slovenian-English Parallel Corpus
• Slovenian - English Dictionary
• Dictionary of Slovenian literary language
• Centre for Slovenian as a Second/Foreign Language
• Slovenian Language and Culture Lessons in Switzerland and Austria
• Thezaurus - Institute for Slovenian Studies of Victoria, Australia
• Slovene at the University of Kansas, USA

month names (old ones)

Can we just remove old month names? They're used very rarely. While natives are aware of them, I doubt many even know their proper order. To add to confusion, Croatian, Czech and Polish have some of similarly named months, which don't always represent the same time of year.

Incorrect translation for "you're welcome"

I just returned from Ljubljana and while there was told in no uncertain terms that "dobrodošli" is never used to mean "you're welcome", as in the exchange "thank you - you're welcome", as is shown in the phrasebook (which explains why many Slovenians looked at me funny when I used it this way). "Dobrodošli" is used to welcome people e.g. to your house or party or whatever, as in "Welcome to my house."

Correct responses to "hvala" ("thank you") are either "prosim" or "ni za kaj," but I'm not sure of the difference. Prosim literally means "please", ni za kaj means "no problem"

I hesitate to change the phrasebook since I know next to nothing of Slovenian, but if no one objects soon I will change it.

Elliott Wolin, elliott@wolinfamily.net 16:13, 28 October 2008 (EDT)129.57.10.188

doughnut

i have changed [doughnut --> obroč] to [doughnut --> krof] but i am not sure if pronunciation was done correctly. English is not my mother tongue so i am a bit skeptical. if you click on listen button on google translate it is actually pronounced as it should be krof 89.212.30.107 22:38, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Is anything unusual about how to pronounce "h"?

The phrasebook says "Also, note how you pronounce j and h in Slovene." But it gives no explicit details about why "h" might be unintuitive to an English speaker. In fact the example given for the letter H is the 'h' in "heat", which sounds very straightforward to me.

I'd request that someone who knows a bit of Slovenian revisit this "note how you pronounce h" warning—either remove it or explain it. Doubleplusjeff (talk) 23:58, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

When "l" is at end of word? syllable?

   When l is at the end of a word or placed after any consonant other than j,
   it is pronounced as w as in bel (BEW, "white"), popoldan (POPOWDAN, "afternoon").

I see a couple problems here:

1. The 2nd example (popoldan) does not show "l" at the end of a word nor after any consonant. So the rule must be more nuanced than we state. I'm wondering if it should instead say "When l is at the end of a consonant or placed after any consonant other than j, it is pronounced as w."
2. We don't show an example of "l" after a consonant.

It'd be great if someone knowledgeable in Slovenian could clean this up a bit! Doubleplusjeff (talk) 00:03, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Phonetics in this way aren't my favourite but it's even more complicated than you might think. Will fix it in the future. A09 (talk) 12:57, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Eating

Eating part is fundamentally flawed as it currently does not point out that Slovene language uses cases. So it is not "Lahko dobim steklenico pivo?" [May I have a bottle of beer] as a reader would imply now, but rather in its' genitive form: "Ali lahko dobim steklenico piva?" Maybe we should point out that words have genders as well to better explain "(a)" suffixes at the end of verbs etc. Thanks on any input regarding this matter. Best, A09 (talk) 17:15, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Sure. My input is that, since you know, you should please add the content! Thanks. Ikan Kekek (talk) 04:44, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Will do in near future. Thanks! A09 (talk) 10:23, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

Yes, feel more than free to improve the phrasebook. As you may guess there aren't too many Slovene editors on en-WV. --Ypsilon (talk) 13:15, 28 July 2024 (UTC)