Slovenian alphabet
Slovenian alphabet is Gajica, 25 letters. 25 letters of the Latin script: three of its own — č, š, ž — and not a single q, w, x, y. The characters are grouped: three letters of its own, familiar to the eye, foreign to the ear, read exactly as they look. Every character on this page can be played: the sound is stored as a file and does not depend on the voices installed on your system.
Three letters of its own
The little roof is called strešica — “a little roof”. Nothing else in the alphabet carries one.
Familiar to the eye, foreign to the ear
Seven letters where your English reading habit will betray you.
Read exactly as they look
Fifteen letters with nothing to learn: the sound is exactly what you expect.
What to know about the “Gajica” script
There are 25 letters. Q, W, X, Y do not exist in the Slovenian alphabet — they turn up only in foreign names and brands. Capitals and small letters differ, as in any Latin script. The combinations “lj”, “nj”, “dž” count as two-letter sequences, not separate signs — this is where Slovenian differs from Serbian and Croatian.
Test yourself
Five characters at random. No need to answer aloud — just pick; the answer appears at once.
- Which character reads as “a as in father”?
A clean “a”. An unstressed one never wilts into “uh”, the way unstressed vowels do in English
- Which character reads as “ch as in church”?
The little roof (strešica) is the only thing separating it from c (ts). Lose the roof and you say a different word: čaj is tea, caj is nothing
- Which character reads as “f as in fish”?
Slovenian has almost no native f-words — the letter lives in borrowings
- Which character reads as “ee as in machine”?
A clean “ee”
- Which character reads as “l as in lip, but u at the end of a syllable”?
The whole past tense rides on this: delal sounds like DE-la-u, bil like BI-u. The spelling never changes
How to learn letters so they stay
You cannot learn a table by staring at it. What works: see a character, try to recall its sound, get it wrong, see the right answer — and come back to that character in a day, not in an hour.
- Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
That is why the alphabet in the app is learned a few characters at a time, not all at once: nobody holds 25 signs in one sitting.
Frequently asked
How many letters in the Slovenian alphabet?
25 letters — Gajica. The characters have capital and small forms.
Can I listen to how the Slovenian letters sound?
Yes. 25 signs on this page have sound: click a character to hear it. The sound works on any phone, and nothing needs to be installed.
How long does it take to learn the Slovenian alphabet?
A few characters a day — one to two weeks, if you come back to what you covered. The whole alphabet crammed in an evening is remembered for an evening: without reviews the next day and three days later, the characters are almost entirely gone.
Where to start: letters or words?
With the letters. A word in an unfamiliar script cannot be read at all, and a word card tells you no more than a picture.