Faking Slovene: Part 1

I have once again become a collector. Not stamps or rabbit figurines (they hopped out of my life years ago), but words. Slovenščina je težka - Slovene is hard, so I am cutting all the corners that I can and greedily snatching up any easily-learned words to add to my vocabulary.

Living in Koper, which is dual language Italian, there are many Italian words that are a part of everyday vocabulary here, and that I already know: ciao, ecco, allora, bravo, mama. I have a special fondness for allora - it means roughly then or so, the sort of word you use before summing something up or talking about what to do next. You can shove it in front of a sentence and sound like you understand the local dialect here.

Then there are the words that have come straight from English. For me, these fit into three groups. The first is ones that look and sound like the English, such as: super, stop, september, november, banana.

The second are words that have Slovene phonetic spelling but sound more or less like the English: turist, telefon, oktober, helo (a telephone greeting). I´d add vikend (weekend) in this category - you just have to pretend you are speaking with a  fake German or Austrian accent to remember it.

More tricky in this category are words where the pronunciation is about the same as English, but the spelling looks much stranger because Slovenian uses very different letters to make the same sound, like pica (pizza), where c is pronounced ts, sendvič (sandwich), where č is ch,and ček (cheque). Or the name Viljem (Vil-yem: William). Put all that together, and you are half way to being able to say you´re going to meet Viljem at the vikend for a sendvič :)

The third group has the English or near-English spelling but Slovenian pronunciation: ideja (ee-day-ah), april (ah-per-il), radio (rah-dee-oh). Again, time for a bit of play-acting at being an Eastern European speaking English.

My husband has coined the phrase ˝faking Slovene˝ for what we do right now - and word collecting is a big part of that. ˝Super ideja!˝

Note: yes, I did correct this when my husband spotted a mistake. I said Slovenian was težka!