How to read in Slovenian

Twenty-five letters, three of them with a little roof

The Slovenian Latin script is Gajica — the same one used across the border in Croatia. Ljudevit Gaj assembled it in the 1830s on the rule “one letter — one sound”. There are no silent letters, no combinations like sh or ch, and you read exactly what is written.

There are twenty-five letters. Four familiar ones are missing altogether: q, w, x, y do not exist in the Slovenian alphabet. Instead there are three of its own — č, š, ž, which are simply ch, sh, zh.

The catch hides in the remaining letters: they look European and sound foreign. cena is “TSE-na”: c is “ts”. j is the y of “yes”, h is a breathy h. And Slovenian does not mumble its unstressed vowels: an unstressed o stays “o” — dobro is DO-bro, never “duh-BRO” the way an English eye would read it.

• hvala

  thank you — “HVA-la”, the h sounds
• cena

  price — “TSE-na”, not “SE-na”
• jutri

  tomorrow — “YOO-tri”, j is the y of “yes”

Where v and l disappear to

Two letters are read differently depending on where they sit in the word, and both drift toward u.

v before a vowel is an ordinary v (voda — “VO-da”). At the end of a syllable and before a consonant it turns into u: avtobus — “AH-oo-to-boos”, vlak — “oo-lak”. The preposition v (in) is just “oo”, with no consonant left at all.

l behaves the same way: before a vowel it is l (levo — “LE-vo”), at the end of a syllable it is u. That is why the whole past tense sounds different from its spelling: delal — “DE-la-u”, bil — “BI-u”, rekel — “RE-kuhl”.

The spelling never changes. This is a reading rule, not a spelling rule.

Words without a single vowel

trg, prst, vrt, krst are not typos and not abbreviations. They really have no vowel on paper, but in speech one appears. Before r a short neutral vowel shows up on its own — the schwa, the same murmur as the first sound in “about”.

trg — “tuhrg” (a square), prst — “puhrst” (a finger), vrt — “vuhrt” (a garden).

The same schwa hides where a vowel is written. Unstressed e is often read exactly like it: pes is “puhss” (a dog), sem in fast speech “suhm”.

When you see a word without vowels, do not look for a misprint. Insert a schwa before r and keep reading.

• trg

  square — “tuhrg”
• vrt

  garden — “vuhrt”
• pes

  dog — “puhss”

What order to take the characters in

The writing course is split into 2 steps: one step is one lesson, a few characters at a time. Nobody takes the whole script at once out of mercy: 10 letters in an evening stay in memory for exactly that, an evening.

• Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many times
  Donovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
• 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 times
  Adesope, 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.

Next

• Slovenian alphabetA reference of all the characters
• TransliterationThe table, both ways
• PronunciationWhat you hear and what is hard
• How to break down an unfamiliar scripta note