Slovenian, slovenščina to its roughly two million speakers, is a South Slavic language written in the Latin alphabet. It has six cases, three genders, verbal aspect, a moveable accent and the dual, a grammatical number for exactly two.
The Foreign Service Institute estimates roughly 1,100 hours of study for the Slavic languages, Slovenian among them, to reach professional working proficiency. Some FSI tables place Slovenian in Category III with its Slavic siblings; others list it in the harder Category IV.
A noun can appear in eighteen forms (six cases times three numbers), and you need to meet them in context thousands of times. Slovenian has far less learner material than French or Spanish. This guide lists Slovenian books by approximate CEFR level, what each demands, and how parallel (sentence-aligned) reading makes them workable.
Why Slovenian Is Hard, and Why Reading Helps Anyway
Six Cases, Three Genders, and Verbal Aspect
Nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals all decline. The six cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, instrumental) answer questions like kdo? (who?), koga? (whom?), komu? (to whom?) and s kom? (with whom?). Combined with gender and number, knjiga (book) appears as knjige, knjigi, knjigo, knjig, knjigami and more.
Most verbs come in aspect pairs: one form for an ongoing or repeated action, the other for a single completed one. English has no clean equivalent for the difference. A parallel translation shows, sentence by sentence, what each ending is doing.
The Dual: Slovenian’s Famous Surprise
Slovenian keeps a third grammatical number, the dual (dvojina), for exactly two of something. It is one of very few living European languages to preserve it in full; only the Sorbian languages of eastern Germany keep it as systematically. Older Indo-European languages had the dual, and almost all of them lost it.
- One book is ena knjiga, three books are tri knjige, but two books are dve knjigi, a dedicated dual form.
- “We two are reading” is midva bereva; “we (three or more) are reading” is mi beremo.
- Dual pronouns: midva and medve for “the two of us,” vidva for “the two of you.”
When two characters walk, argue or fall in love, the dual appears naturally and repeatedly. The parallel translation shows where the English “we” or “they” corresponds to a Slovenian two-of-us form.
The Scarcity of Graded Material, Said Plainly
Slovenian has no shelves of graded readers tuned to A1, A2 and B1, as French or Spanish do. There are textbooks, coursebooks for the slovenščina courses for foreigners and a few simplified texts, but no large commercial catalogue of graded fiction. The realistic on-ramp is a familiar text (a children’s classic, a fairy tale, a translation of a story you know) read with a parallel translation.
A1-A2: Your First Slovenian Books
Choose texts where you roughly know what happens, so your attention goes to the cases, the dual and high-frequency vocabulary.
Mali princ (The Little Prince)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince is Mali princ in Slovenian. The sentences are short, the vocabulary concrete and repetitive, and you probably know the story already.
Why it works: the translation uses clean, standard Slovenian, not dialect or archaic forms.
What to watch for: all six cases and the dual appear from page one. Expect the same words in different shapes.
Slovenian Folk Tales and Martin Krpan
Many tales from Slovenia’s oral tradition are retold in accessible language. The most famous is Martin Krpan by Fran Levstik, first published in 1858. A strong, modest peasant and salt-smuggler from the Inner Carniola region travels to Vienna and defeats a giant terrorising the imperial court. Almost every Slovene grows up with it.
Why it works: a clear narrative arc and folk-tale repetition.
What to watch for: Levstik’s prose is nineteenth-century and deliberately folkloric, older than modern conversational Slovenian. Treat it as a reading milestone, not a source of everyday phrases.
Svetlana Makarovič’s Children’s Stories
Svetlana Makarovič (born 1939), often called the first lady of Slovenian poetry, is also one of the country’s most loved authors of children’s and picture books. Pekarna Mišmaš (“The Mishmash Bakery,” 1974) and the Kosovirja tales (“Cosies,” beginning in 1974) are staples of the Slovenian school curriculum.
Why it works: modern, standard language in short forms, with everyday vocabulary.
What to watch for: wordplay and invented names can confuse a beginner. A sentence-aligned translation shows which words are real.
B1-B2: Building Real Reading Stamina
Once the core case patterns feel familiar, move to adult literature.
Ivan Cankar: Hlapec Jernej in njegova pravica
Ivan Cankar (1876-1918) is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the Slovenian language, sometimes mentioned alongside Kafka or Joyce. Much of his best-known work is short.
Hlapec Jernej in njegova pravica (1907, The Bailiff Yerney and His Rights): a short novella about a farm servant’s doomed quest for justice. Start here.
Level: B1-B2.
Why it works: controlled, clear sentences and vocabulary that stays coherent within each story.
What to watch for: early twentieth-century literary language, some of it aged, and heavy symbolism beneath a plain surface.
Ivan Cankar: Na klancu
Na klancu (On the Slope, 1902): a fuller novel of poverty and family on the outskirts of town, longer and denser.
Level: B2.
France Prešeren, the National Poet: Sonetni venec
France Prešeren (1800-1849) is the national poet; a stanza of his forms the national anthem. His masterpiece, the Sonetni venec (A Wreath of Sonnets, 1834), is a crown of fifteen sonnets. The last line of each becomes the first line of the next, and the initial letters of the final “master” sonnet spell out a dedication.
Why it works: poetry makes you attend to every word, including case endings and the dual.
What to watch for: inverted word order, poetic vocabulary and compressed grammar. Read it as a B2-and-up project, one sonnet at a time, with the parallel translation.
C1+: Contemporary and Internationally Available Slovenian
Both titles below have English translations, which parallel reading needs at this level.
Drago Jančar: To noč sem jo videl
Drago Jančar is Slovenia’s most internationally celebrated living novelist. To noč sem jo videl (2010; I Saw Her That Night, translated by Michael Biggins) reconstructs the life and wartime disappearance of Veronika Zarnik, a young woman from Ljubljana, through the testimonies of five people who knew her. It won the Kresnik Award and has been translated into more than two dozen languages.
Why it works: modern, standard prose and five narrators with different voices.
What to watch for: broad vocabulary and a Second World War setting whose context an outside reader may lack. Read it after Cankar.
Boris Pahor: Nekropola
Boris Pahor (1913-2022), a Slovene writer from Trieste who lived to 108, survived Nazi concentration camps. His autobiographical novel Nekropola (1967, Necropolis) is framed by a return visit to the Natzweiler camp, where he was a prisoner and medical orderly. It is regularly compared to the testimony of Primo Levi and Imre Kertész.
Why it works: clear prose, and a respected English translation makes sentence-level parallel reading feasible.
What to watch for: the content is harrowing (this is Holocaust literature), and the reflective, essayistic passages demand confident C1+ Slovenian.
The Dual and Choosing Your First Slovenian Book
Without graded readers, many learners start with Cankar or Prešeren and stall. Begin with a text you can almost predict, then climb toward the canon.
Slow down when you meet dva, dve, oba, obe, or pronouns like midva and vidva: they mark “exactly two.” The parallel English says a plain “we,” “you” or “they,” while the Slovenian marks the pair.
A practical sequence:
- Mali princ: Slovenian sentence structure through a known story.
- A Makarovič tale or a Slovenian folk tale: short children’s language, modern or folkloric.
- Martin Krpan: a cultural milestone and a step up in register.
- Ivan Cankar’s short novellas (Hlapec Jernej in njegova pravica): your first adult literature.
- Jančar’s To noč sem jo videl, then Pahor’s Nekropola: advanced, with English translations for parallel reading.
The same method works for other South Slavic languages: see our best books to learn Croatian through reading.
Reading Slovenian With Lingo7
Every book above works in Lingo7 once you have it as an ebook: the app reads any EPUB, FB2, PDF, DOCX or TXT file you import, with parallel translation. The public domain titles marked “Add to Lingo7 free” are already in the Lingo7 library and cost nothing to add.
- Sentence-level aligned parallel translations for books in 50 languages, Slovenian among them. Tap a sentence and its translation appears, without losing the original.
- Synchronized native audio on many titles, with the current word highlighted as it is spoken. Slovenian accent placement and vowel quality are not obvious from spelling.
- Save words in context and review them later with spaced repetition.
- On-demand translation for anything that still resists you.
Lingo7 runs on iOS and Android and is free to start.
Our language difficulty guide puts Slovenian in context, and our honest guide to parallel reading covers the method’s strengths and limits. For a first attempt, see how to read your first book in a foreign language, how many words you need to read fluently and our book recommendations by level.
The Bottom Line
- A1-A2: Mali princ, Martin Krpan, Svetlana Makarovič and the folk tales.
- B1-B2: Ivan Cankar’s short novellas, then France Prešeren’s sonnets.
- C1+: Drago Jančar and Boris Pahor in parallel with their English translations.