The most joyful month of the year is here again, and like every year this is the time for presents, happy and peaceful moments with loved ones, merrymaking, family reunions, and time when we usually look back and see what…
February 8 is a Slovenian cultural holiday, called Prešeren Day (Prešernov dan). It is when Slovenians celebrate the anniversary of the death of our greatest poet France Prešeren (December 3 1800, Vrba – February 8 1849, Kranj). On the same…
The regular neuter nouns in Slovenian (ending with an -o or -e) have the ending –i in dual and –a in plural. For example okno–okni–okna (window). They are declined as follows: But some neuter nouns have a prolonged ending in dual and plural,…
Have you ever been confused about some Slovenian words that look very similar at first glance, but have a completely different meaning? Probably you know the words jutro, jutri and zjutraj, right? »They’re familiar to me and I know their meaning, but right now I just…
In Slovenian, like in many other languages, there are the nouns which only have a singular or plural form. Today, I will concentrate on the Slovenian plural nouns. The neuter plural nouns The nouns which only exist in plural and…
In one of the previous blog posts I wrote about feminine exceptions, but the masculine gender also has many features. The basic rule is that the masculine nouns in Slovenian end in a consonant in singular. In dual they get…
How to curse in Slovenian? Every student of a foreign language eventually wants to learn some swear words. If nothing else, to enrich their vocabulary and sound more like native speakers. Traditional Slovenian swear words (kletvice) are mild by nature, they don’t…
The final L in some Slovenian words in the nominative can be pronounced as U or L. This can be tough to guess for someone who is learning the language, so I will give a few tips when to pronounce the final L as L or…
Are you currently an expat living in Ljubljana? Do your Slovenian friends often ask where exactly you live in Ljubljana, and you have no idea how to say that in Slovenian? Would you like to say in Slovenian that you come…
As with every other language, Slovenian often has more than one way of expressing the same thing – the synonyms (sopomenke). So, the word idea can be ideja, zamisel or domislica in Slovenian, and all the three words can be used interchangeably; however, the first one,…
Slovenian has three grammatical genders: feminine, masculine and neuter. The feminine nouns usually end with –a, the masculine with a consonant and the neuter ones with –o or –e. However, there is a feature, where feminine nouns can also end…
Slovenian is one of the rare languages that has the grammatical number dual – it is used specifically for two objects or persons. But there are, ironically, also exceptions where we use plural instead of dual for two things. These are even…