You will never learn Slovene

I've been reading Michael Manski's blog which is quiet amusing. As he is an expat in Slovenia he faces some everyday-life difficulties. One of the major problems is the Slovene language. I must admit its grammar is different and more complicated from that of most other languages. Especially English seems a lot easier to learn. To quote Michael: Learning Slovene is a long, hard road into Hell. I’ll tell you what’s tough: six cases, endless gender declensions, formal and informal divisions, the dual grammatical form — all of it spoken in 32 dialects that are further divided into 76 sub-groups. That’s my definition of tough.

To give you an Idea of what he meant he chose for an example the sentence:

Did you eat anything? - which pretty much covers every imaginable scenario. You can say that to a woman, to a man, to your pet hamster, to your boss, to a group of circus clowns, etc…

In a language like German (usually considered difficult to learn) you have three possibilities to express the same idea. You would say:

1. Hast du was gegessen? (informal)
2. Haben Sie was gegessen? (formal)
3. Habt ihr was gegessen? (plural)

In other words, German requires triple the possibilities to express the same idea. But note that the verb “to eat” (gegessen) remains the same in all three cases.

Now let’s take a look at Slovene, in which everything changes depending on the number of people you’re asking, as well as their gender AND if you’re using formal or not. Behold the possibilities:

1. Si kaj jedel? (one male, informal)
2. Si kaj jedla? (one female, informal)
3. Si kaj jedlo? (neuter form, informal)
4. Sta kaj jedla? (two males, informal or formal)
5. Sta kaj jedli? (two females, informal or formal)
6. Sta kaj jedla? (one male and one female, informal or formal)
7. Ste kaj jedli? (plural, as long as at least one male is present)
8. Ste kaj jedle? (plural, females only)
9. Ste kaj jedla? (plural, neuter form)
10. Ste kaj jedli? (formal, singular form, gender unimportant)