Some notes on the Czech language
Since I am living in the Czech republic, people regularly ask me if the local language isn't difficult.
It is. Here, I'll try to explain why.
Pronunciation
Contrary to common belief, the pronunciation of Czech really isn't that hard. Hearing you are a foreigner,
Czechs will often walk up to you and say:
Strč prst skrz krk!
The best way to react is to just repeat the sentence after them. Some of the more pertinent may also want
to test your ability to pronounce the ř. This is basically a rolling r that should be pronounced such that
you spray your speaking partner with ample saliva. So saying:
Třistatřicettři stříbrných střikaček střikalo nad třistatřicettři stříbrných střech.
will usually convince anyone that your pronunciation is perfect and doesn't need further testing. Even
Czechs, it should be said, sometimes find their own language hard to pronounce. So in a normal sentence
like:
Vlk zhltl hrst zrn.
most Czechs will not pronounce the `l' at the end of the second word. Why? The answer is simple: with this l,
the sentence would be unpronouncable.
Cases
This is a more tricky aspect of Czech, especially for beginners. The main trouble is that words never seem to
look quite the way they are written in the dictionary. Take, for example, the sentence:
Mlynář Miler se svou ženou
ovce malou lávkou ženou.
When trying to translate such a sentence, one encounters the difficulty that `ženou' is not a word that occurs
in the dictionary. Actually, this is the word `žena' with the `-a' ending changed to `-ou' to indicate the
seventh case. The solution to the problem, therefore, is simple. Just change all `-ou' in the sentence above
to `-a' and you'll find all words you need in the dictionary.
Sometimes things get a little harder, since Czechs do not only use the ending `-ou'. So, for example,
dna, dne, dně, dni, dní, dno, dnou, dnu, dnů, dny
are al legal forms, stemming, in fact, from three different words, meaning `day', `gout', and `bottom'.
Can you guess which belong to which?
Special symbols
This is definately the hardest part of Czech. One of the first things you'll notice when reading Czech
is that Czechs like to decorate their letters with little symbols like é or ě. The trouble is that these
decorations are not random, but follow complicated rules. For example, it is:
Je tu žeň. but Je tu bez žen.
or, to take another example:
Na jedné noze. but Dva nože.
Sometimes it gets really complicated, like in:
Zebra žebra žebrá.
Understanding the rules that govern these symbols is no doubt the biggest challenge Czech poses to foreigners.