Slovene

7 Reasons You Should Learn Slovene

Take a hundred different people from various parts of the world and I bet not a single one would pick Slovene as the language they wanted to learn. I don’t think it would even rank among the top three choices. And only a few could probably pinpoint the exact location of the country speaking it. As someone who has been fluent in Slovene since I could walk, it is so my mission to shed some light on this interesting language. Here are some great facts that will make you consider Slovenian when you can’t decide between Spanish, German or Chinese.

7 Reasons to LearnSlovene (2)Language perfect for the spies

Slovenian is spoken by roughly 2,4 million people and most of them live in Slovenia. It makes it almost ideal for a code language. If you steer far from Europe, chances you would be understood are pretty slim. Frankly just a few hours’ drive gets you out of the country and probably not even our neighbors such as Austria, Italy or Hungary will know what we are saying.

It’s easier than Russian

Slovenian is a South Slavic language, closely related to Croatian and Serbian and similar to those spoken in Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic. And since we are not using Cyrillic it will be much easier to learn than Russian.

So diverse

It is said to be the most diverse Slavic language in terms of dialects. There a 46 of them. So once you crack the official language make sure you don’t venture too far out of the capital of Ljubljana, as even the rest of Slovenes have trouble understanding people in regions such as Prekmurje.

Multilingual when you are angry

Slovenes have very innocent and mostly quite funny swear words. For example: Tristo kosmatih medvedov!(Three hundred hairy bears!) That doesn’t sound like I am being serious, does it. So, when really upset, we usually borrow the swear words from other languages – Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. We were all once a republic of Yugoslavia and it seems these are a few remnants of those times. Anyway if you learn Slovene, you will be able to go to multilingual in seconds.

The most romantic language

Forget French or Italian. Slovenian has the word love in its very name and it’s also one of the few languages that in addition to singular and plural also has dual. Making it perfect for lovers and very precise, as in Slovene there is nothing vague about how many of you are going to dinner.

Very polite

Just imagine how polite the British could be if they spoke Slovenian, because we have a chance to use two forms of ‘you’ for formal and informal situations. Imagine how very confused one could get with all of these yous and when to use which one.

It’s not as difficult

Like any language, Slovenian too has many rules and quirks, but at the end of the day it is not as ruthless as French, where one word has half of the letters of the alphabet in it and yet you pronounce the only letter not included. Or incomprehensible like German with their words that take a whole paragraph. Who can blame Slovenes for making some rules of our own, to have fun with that one person trying to master the language.

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