Internet is a trully wonderful invention. Besides being a great way to get on the net (courtesy Bob Dole), a refuge for various radical leftists, revolutionaries, perverst, commie-pinkos, corrupted remnansts of a nepotist mentality, general no-goodniks and the rest of us scum who should be dealt with swiftly and mercilessly, internet can provide some awesome tools for things that do not have a large market potential. Like Slovene language.
But thankfully, some people acutally do use internet to get on the net and do not chase leftists ideals or just chase leftists. One of those people who actually spend their time on-line constructively is Michael N., who stumbled upon Distance Slovene, a website dedicated to distance learning of Slovene language.
The site is a collaborative effort between The Centre for Slovene as a Second/Foreign Language, Ministry of Education and Sports, Ministry of Higher Education and Technology and Laboratory for Telecommunications at Faculty of Electronics, and it rocks. All you need is to enable popups, register and start rolling.
So – go learn! Kaj še čakate!? 
P.S.: There are reports that the site has problems with Firefox. It worked fine in my FF, but I did have to manually enable pop-ups.
From what I’ve seen, it’s just another half-baked project where the government siphons the taxpayer’s euros.
I think it would be much more effective, if they just uploaded the videos (+ supplementing materials) of courses they hold for foreigners at Filozofska fakulteta. Just like they do at MIT.
Oops, this reminds me I wanted to write about a good online learning programme for Slovenian by the University of Hamburg, for German-speaking learners only.
There used to be some half-assed course of Slovene online, but the problem is, as always, that no one in Slovenia speaks proper slovene to start with… Ahja. I’ll probably take the Swedish distance course at the university of Gothenbourg next autumn, so then I won’t have try and learn from unfinished projects.
And of course I keep my fingers crossed that this project will turn out to be a good one.
So now I have no excuse!
Pisalo is Kuli? Where?
I had to check the kinder section…
@gandalf: well, it is a beta version 🙂
@Adriaan: We’ll be monitoring your progress soon, I hope 🙂
Er..Gulp!
I think I stumbled upon this site a long time ago, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it and quickly lost interest. Enable popups to get started, huh? Would be nice if they put that onto the opening page…
i’ve tried this site a few times and it always stalls or gives incorrect information or some other SNAFU. instead of fighting with this site, i am just saving my euros to take a real course at Center za Slovenščino this summer. in the meantime, i’ll be scraping by with my painfully slow and grammatically incorrect Gorenjskified version of the language. around these parts, we like to call it camilleščina. 🙂
Adriaan… gulp away… though shalt be examined! 😈
I got it bookmarked. Together with the English-Slovene grammar book (uni level) and the CD-ROM English-Slovene (and vice versa, of course) dictionary, I’m sure it’ll teach me the language succesfully. 😉
@ARF – I highly recommend the ASP dictionary also. I use it a million times a day. It’s a God-send!
Perhaps it would have been best if I’d just lurked on this site rather than comment.
The bar is set rather higher than I can leap, unfortunately.
I’ll have to get some spring enhanced boots.
Wow, nice to see the usual suspects back in action 🙂
I can see the site is getting mixed reviews, so hopefully its creators will notice them.
@Adriaan: Every journey begins with a first step… And you’ve already mastered “hvala” and “prosim”, so you’re not exactly new to the game 🙂
Pengovsky + Chairman Mao? Who’d have thought?
2 words down. How many to go?
@Adriaan – If you need a conversation buddy, let me know when and where. I think emotional support is a big part of studying such a gutwrenchingly difficult langauge.
Damn! couldn’t work the = sign.
It should of course read.
Pengovsky = Chairman Mao.
It stands corrected
@Camille: You’re very kind. Just what I’d suspect of people who inhabit this site (Karel excluded). I may yet take you up on your generous offer.
A Slovene self-help group. I like the sound of that.
Mao said that? I thought it was an old Vulcan proverb
But personally, I’m more inclined to agree with Deng Xiaoping who famously said that “it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”
This is the problem with received wisdom. It’s rarely correct.
The correct quote (and source) is here.
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/24004.html
Come on down: Lao-tzu.
At least I knew it was Chinese (Not Vulcan!).
🙂
Damn you, Mr. Spock!!!!
Thanks for the link, Camille! Will certainly take advantage of it! Hvala lepa!
For those of you who can’t wait to use all the 6 Slovenian cases in all 3 numbers: you can check your declensions HERE
Darn! Pengovsky, will you please add the last part of the HTML…
Done 🙂
@Peng: “One of those people who actually spend their time on-line constructively is Michael N.” Hmm…well not entirely true, I do check out the Friday Foxies every now & again. 😛
@Camille – I also had some hanging issues with the site…but they only appear to occur when it’s run on Firefox. No doubt because the site is most likely optimized for IE. When run on IE it seems to run fine.
@pengy … it’s been “on beta” since 2 yrs ago then 🙂
I kinda stopped learning it actively and resorted to learning it by osmosis… if ever. Guess a “Foreigners Anonymous” session wouldn’t be bad.