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Welcome in United States: A cartoon from the magazine Mladina.
Slovenes have a talent for foreign languages. I think it’s because almost every language is easier than their own. To a Slovene, learning German (with its pitiful four cases) is like taking a quiet vacation at the seaside. (Slovenian has 6 cases, plus the unique and deadly “dual form.”)
English is even easier for them, and virtually everyone under 30 can speak it here. It helps that television shows, movies and music are mostly in English. But while Slovenes are good, they often trip over some of the easier things.
Here are the top five mistakes Slovenes make when speaking English:
1. Saying “here you have” for izvolite
When a Slovene hands you something, they’ll often say “Here you have” instead of “Here you go” or “Here you are.” (Or even “There you go” or “There you are.”) During my time here, I’ve only met one person who said it correctly. I was so shocked that I forgot to compliment her.
2. “Welcome in” instead of “Welcome to”
In this case, the culprit is the Slovene preposition “v” which is used for “in.” Dobrodošli v Sloveniji literally means “Welcome in Slovenia” and so you’ll often hear exactly that. (See the Mladina cartoon above for a living example.) I don’t know if it’s true, but I also heard that two years ago the Croatian government constructed signs saying “Welcome in Croatia” for their borders — then had to junk them all when they discovered their mistake.
3. Prosim / Please
The Slovenian word prosim is one of those multiple-use words. Slovenes answer the phone with prosim, they say you’re welcome with prosim and they say excuse me with prosim. So it’s very common to hear a Slovene who doesn’t understand what you just said say: “Please?” instead of “Excuse me?” or “Come again?” or “What the hell you talkin’ ’bout?”
4. Hvala! Enako!
Sometimes when you say “thanks!” or “have a nice weekend!” Slovenes will shout back “Same!”
5. Dober tek / Good appetite
In the days when I spoke English in restaurants, 99.5% of waiters wished me “good appetite!” — the directly translated version of dober tek. Moreover, many people refuse to believe that English speakers often use “Bon appetit” instead.
After all is said and done, it’s worth repeating that Slovenes are absolutely excellent at English and can probably put most Europeans to shame in that regard. They are definitely more successful at learning foreign languages than foreigners are at learning theirs.
But in the interests of fairness, I will soon put together: “The top five mistakes I make when speaking Slovene.” And you will see that they are much, much worse.
Comments
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I know you’ll be amazed to hear that Serbs make these exact same five mistakes.
I have to say, we didn’t really see them as /mistakes/. If you say “have a nice time!” and someone replies, “Same!”, it’s a little odd but the meaning comes right across. Same with “good appetite” and “please?” Those seemed charmingly different rather than wrong.
So, from our POV, #2 and maybe #1 were the only ones that really seemed like *bad* English. The rest would fall within the normal range of odd local variation.
Which in English is quite broad! If I can understand an Alabaman saying “You might could do that,” or an Irish friend saying “That was a sadness on him,” then “same” doesn’t sound too bad…
Doug M.
Ah, no, I disagree. German is not easy for Slovenians because of the articles and the strict besedni red. And I haven’t been talking about spelling yet.
You are right - Slovenians are great with foreign languages, but just today in Ljubljana I thought that their grammar often is far from A grades.
It’s interesting is how you can figure out the system of another language when hearing the mistakes people make i. e. in English.
Greetz
Novala
german is simple , as its mostly written as spoken ! must be harder for people from ljubljana though !
Marburg uber alles !
German written as spoken?? That’s a good one ;-))
it is , trust me , most of the words are written exactly as they are pronounced , not as extreme as serbian but still , or maybe its just me and my amazing talent for languages !
Compliment to you: It’s just you.
What about Städte - Stätte, Thron - Ton - Sohn, Lärche - Lerche, setze - Sätze, Kuss - Bus, Hahn - kam, Häute - Leute, viel - fiel, Achse - Haxe, hören - Möhren …
nlp.fi.muni.cz/projekty/lexdb/czeng.cgi?mode=contents
Don Sparling wrote a great book, “English or Czenglish” that details all of the commonly made mistakes for Czechs. I bet most of them are the same for Slovenes.
Check it out (Czech it out? hee). You might enjoy it.
In Russian, the preposition “v” can mean both “in” or “to”, depending on the case you use it with.
Does Slovenian use a pronoun other than “v” when saying “going to the store” or something simliar?
Yes. They use “na”.
Interestingly, “na” (on) is only used for two cities, as far as I know. Everything else takes “v.”
So, while Slovenes say they are “in” Ljubljana, Berlin, Boston, Ouagadougou, etc… they say they are “on” Vienna and Ptuj. (Ptuj being the oldest Slovenian town and Vienna being the old imperial capital, which I presume has something to do with it.)
It’s also “na Bled/u”
there are some more towns that go with ‘na’, e.g.
Ravne na Koroskem,
Vrhnika,
Hi!
I study English and French in Ljubljana and first of all I must say that I disagree with almost everything you said. First of all, all the languages in the world have, let’s say, approximately the same level of difficulty. Eskimos have 75 different expressions for a single word in Slovene and English meaning “snow”. In Papua-New Guinea, 245 expressions for banana, etc.
ENGLISH IS CERTAINLY NOT AN EASY LANGUAGE. In fact, it is one of the most complex languages in the world and it is not true that almost everybody under 30 in Slovenia can speak it. I mean, maybe they know the basic stuff, but they’re NOT fluent speakers of GOOD ENGLISH. English has a very complicated syntax and semantics, including the word order, tenses, etc. English also has THE LARGEST VOCABULARY OF ALL WORLD’S LANGUAGES. It is the languages of millions of idioms and synonyms. OK, so it doesn’t have nearly as much word inflections (endings) as Slovene, but this is not the standard for measuring the difficulty of a language. Slovene has a relatively poor vocabulary when compared to many other European languages, believe me, I’m confronting this problem every day, because I study translation!
I know this thread is pretty old, but some facts need to be corrected
novala, Ptuj is not the oldest Slovenian town, Celje is:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celje
Miso, Ptuj IS the oldest town.
Hello!
I know thread is two years old, and it’s one year since last comment..
Still: isn’t Škofja Loka oldest town in Slovenia? Celje definitely isn’t. It’s either Ptuj or Škofja Loka.