Colloquial Slovene: A Complete Language Course (Colloquial Series) [Hardcover]

Lesson 7 out of 13 and I am making progress, it's intense, but grammar is introduced at a sensible pace and in a logical order. So why just the 3 stars overall?

The course feels thrown together and would score just 1 or 2 stars if marked for care of editing alone. Slovene grammar is difficult so it needs to be clear, but this course has confusing examples. In chapter 7 it says that in the past tense, without personal pronouns, the auxiliary verb goes after the main verb, but in exercise 3 almost every single answer (still without PPs) shows the auxiliary before the main verb; in chapter 5 it says that in the accusative there is no change in adjective or noun ending for 3rd declension, inanimate nouns, it gives the example of "novi auto" (new car) in the nominative and "nov auto" in the accusative! Erm, that's either a change in the adjective ending, a bad example or an error... and there ARE errors e.g. the dual "we two" form of "iti" (to go) is given as "grava", in fact it's "greva".

What else? Some exercises come a few pages before an explanation of the grammar point which they are testing! Some vocab is used but not translated anywhere e.g. "gulazu" (???), while other words are translated in repeated lists. After chapter 2 or 3, the dialogues become super-rocket paced... there is little hope for a novice to understand without looking at the text. Disheartening. This doesn't help learning pronunciation, which is another problem: words are not accented in the vocab lists, a flaw seeing as syllable emphasis is very different from in spoken English. Most frustrating is the hugely common word "v" meaning "in" or "to": several months in and I still don't know how it is pronounced - in the dialogues it is sometimes spoken as a "v" sometimes as a "u"... there seems to be no pattern, there is no explanation. More generally, word order remains a mystery... though the course claims it doesn't matter much. Finally the grammar overview at the rear of the book is inadequate: there is nowhere to go for most grammar tables... you have to find the place in the book where the grammatical point was originally "explained". Doesn't help revision.

The course could never have made learning Slovenian easy but it could have made it a lot easier, in fact all the above have made it harder than necessary.. I've started it so I'm sticking at it... and I do now speak some Slovenian, so it's not all bad, hence the 3 stars (just), but there could be something better out there. To translate the review title: it's not bad, but it's not good.

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 course is quite good: mostly clearly-presented, good accompanying audio, mostly not too dull (though some of the chapters are absolute shockers), and it largely gets the thumbs up from native speakers. I did find, though, that as it's trying to cover a lot of ground in a short space, it tends to move on quite fast without enough systematic practice of new structures or vocabulary, so after about five units I felt the need to buy an additional beginners book in Slovenia to help embed the basics.

If you have the choice of the complete course (ie with CDs/tapes) or just the book, get the complete course: since word-stress in Slovene isn't predictable, and the book doesn't use any symbols to show where the stress falls, you can end up sounding very funny indeed if you haven't heard the words for yourself.