Looking for a Slovenian school textbook
I'm trying to pick up Slovenian, and so far the resources are really limited. I'm familiar with the language to the point where I can tell a direction or show what hurts, but not enough to really flex the vocabulary. I'm mostly missing on the fundamentals: cardinal and ordinal countables, noun and adjective declensions, conditional form of verb, in general morphology and syntax
So far my approach was a combination of consuming whatever I could find online and using Google Translate and DeepL Translator (with obsessive pseudo-anonymization), as well as Wiktionary (which is fairly weak, actually), but I feel like I'm not progressing from this point, and it's been years.
If someone has access to, be it direct or through a friend of a friend, to the good ol' school textbook for anywhere between 4th and 9th grades and can either PDF it or ship an actual paper copy to a (pseudo-anonymized) address within the EU, I would really, really appreciate it.
Slovenia is one of the most beautiful places around here, the people are very, very nice, and I just feel like I should do my best and show up prepared and do my best to not be an idiot tourist who can't say a single sentence when it really matters. I know the locals don't give a shit about someone who is there for a few days in their entire life and who then disappears into nothingness, but I just can't, you know.
Maybe not a school textbook, maybe some dictionary with declensions and plural forms, that would also help a ton. I'm talking Slovenian dictionary in the same language, monolingual.
Apr 24 · 13 days ago
9 Comments ↓
Google translate is much better than it was, but if Spanish is representative of its capabilities, it is last resort crap.
The worst is that, translating from a language you are not that familiar with, it will accept almost anything and give a translation of some adjacent word or phrase in your language.
You may then walk away thinking you've learned a new word but will memorize gibberish instead.
It is useful if you heard something and want to find out what it means, but is a pretty bad teacher.
I have managed to find two decently looking books on Slovene that might interest you (I don't speak it myself, so I can't attest for sure):
Slovene : A Comprehensive Grammar by Peter Herrity
and
Colloquial Slovene by Pirnat-Greenberg Marta (this one has audio too)
The first one can be found on Internet Archive, the second one is missing (though you will find it 'on the seas', I'm not sure if I can share links like that here).
Also in general I noticed there's a bunch of Slovene dictionaries and courses on Internet Archive, so you might want to check it out.
I would also say to use DeepL over Google Translate.
I know it's not popular here. but chatgpt is pretty good with languages and makes a decent tutor if you know enough to spot when its bullshitting you. With languages I haven't seen any hallucinations lately.
Unlike C code which is atrocious.
🗡️ The_Jackal · Apr 24 at 22:11:
@stack I don't know if Slovenian is on there, but Deepl seems to be quite a bit better than Google translate. At least with Norwegian, which I verified with a Norwegian. Something to look out for is that sometimes punctuation and capitalization, at least in my case, would sometimes make it give a different translation, i.e. in my experience with translating something to Turkish, Christ. gives you Tanrım. and Christ gives you İsa and lists Mesih as an alternative.
LLMs are definitely good with the bigger languages, but I would be wary using it with Slovene since it's a small language (no harm in trying, though)
🗡️ The_Jackal · Apr 24 at 22:14:
One of the things I've felt LLMs could really succeed at would be language learning.
Knowing a native speaker who's a good teacher would obviously be one of the best options of course. LLMs might be able to be the next best thing, however.
🐝 pirkka [OP] · Apr 25 at 11:09:
@naktis thanks! I'll take a look, although I'm a normie and don't know how to go further than what the classic search engines provide in terms of links. Maybe I can buy an actual physical copy at an actual book store, which I'll be visiting quite soon. But the first one & the Internet Archive, I'll check it out, thanks again!
@stack @The_Jackal I actually do use a mix of different cloud LLMs, although not directly. DuckDuckGo provides a (more or less trustworthy) proxy to the GPTs of the world, and Perplexity and their own model (I think they've trained their own?) is pretty accurate sometimes. It's just that some marginal for LLM but very important for me use cases, such as "here's a word, give me for every singular and plural form, for every declension, the endings of this word". In such cases the output is rarely good and often misleading (i.e., downright wrong)
What seems to be (semi?)-official monolingual dictionary, Fran, is then my second step to get the declensions and some short expressions using the word, like this:
Anyways, thanks a lot for the tips, it is very nice of you all and just once again proves how nice this place (I mean BBS) is! <3
🗡️ The_Jackal · Apr 25 at 14:25:
@pirrka Which ones are you using and would recommend for language learning?
As another note about Deepl I forgot to mention, context and depending on how your sentence is structured can change how it's translated quite a bit more than on Google translate too.
🐝 pirkka [OP] · Apr 27 at 21:00:
To be honest, all models feel the same, but the "bigger" ones tend to over-explain a lot. I found Perplexity's own model to be quite good at translation and explaining the syntax, morphology, and grammar. In general, even as "old" a model as GPT-3.5 is fine. I have to verify every word anyway, and there are tasks at which all models are universally bad, such as giving me a breakdown of grammar cases for a particular noun