How can i learn czech

So many words can be broken up like this, so studying the prefixes and suffixes gives you an exponential amount of possibilities to understand the language. This is not the case. Sorry Czech, but your cases don't scare me in the least.

It does take a bit of getting used to that you have to remember if you are changing that last o to an a and which case to use etc. This is something that you can get used to! In fact, it soon becomes quite natural! It may seen annoying when starting off, since we don't have this in English, but you must look at it from within the language itself, instead of from English. You can't say in Praha or to Praha ; it would obviously be in Praze and to Prahy , duh!!

You may be sceptical to think that this is easy, but let's compare it to other languages: Czech failed to impress me in difficulty in so many counts and noun declensions was one of them.

In Irish we also have the genitive and vocative sense for example, but because of initial mutations on words, when we alter a word, the ending and the beginning is changed. A word starting with a B changes to a V sound for example. In Czech all they do is change the ending, and the rules are very consistent explained in the book I mentioned.

In French you can almost never just say a singular word in a sentence without adding an in definite article, which requires you to know its gender. However, when you do learn genders of nouns they are easy to remember.

There are exceptions, but they follow predictable guidelines. There may be 3 genders, but it's very easy to remember which gender a noun is, especially compared to a language like French and to what I remembered from German, which has more complex ending-gender association rules and can seem much more random. There is no challenge in the Czech language that you cannot overcome. The consonant clusters are tricky, but in Czech, some consonants tend to act like vowels, so krk neck actually sounds a bit like Kirk although note that the r is rolled, and this was one advantage I did have when starting because I've already learned this sound from Spanish , just with the vowel sound reduced.

Children learn this language all the time, so a smart adult like you has no excuses! It's possible to retort this post with a list of reasons why Czech is hard, but why bother?

How can that help language learners? Czech has great literature and can be a very expressive and difficult language to master. I challenge you to find even more reasons why it's easy rather than tell me how wrong I am about it not being hard. Give this language a try and let me know what I missed in my quest to prove that it can indeed be spoken quite well, quite quickly. Apart from these tips specifically for Czech, it's very important to have an efficient study and learning method.

Tip: When you first start, it may be tempting to find a translation of the lyrics in your native language. However, if you're learning by immersion, it's better to try to understand the lyrics as best you can from the context of the song rather than relying on a translation, which may not be exact. Log in Social login does not work in incognito and private browsers.

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Download Article Explore this Article methods. Tips and Warnings. Related Articles. Method 1. All rights reserved. This image may not be used by other entities without the express written consent of wikiHow, Inc. Start with the basic consonants. The Czech alphabet includes 22 consonants, many of which are pronounced the same as the similar letter in English. However, there is one consonant, "ch," that doesn't exist in English.

There are also a few letters that sound somewhat different from their English counterparts. The letters "q," "w," and "x" appear in foreign words only, and are pronounced as they would be in the origin language. Distinguish soft consonants from hard consonants. The basic consonants are considered "hard" consonants. Practice long vowel sounds. Long vowels are marked in Czech by a short slanting line above the letter.

The only exception is with the letter "u. However, the pronunciation remains the same. Each of the 6 vowels has a long version. Add short vowel sounds. If a Czech vowel doesn't have a mark over it, you pronounce it with the short sound. As in English, each vowel has both a short and a long version, although the sounds of Czech short vowels can be different. Understand how to use the softening vowel. It only appears after the consonants "b," "d," "m," "n," "p," "t," and "v.

Stress the first syllable in Czech words. The stress in all Czech words is the same, which makes words relatively easy to pronounce. Once you know how to sound out the word, you don't have to worry about putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable. With longer words, you may have secondary stress. Only syllables with long vowels ever take secondary stress.

Method 2. But this is my take on it! This is a relief when it comes to learning to read and write in Czech. But you do need to focus a little on pronunciation. First, watch this short video.

There are a few letters in this video that might seem challenging to the average English speaker. As for the rest of the Czech alphabet, there are several other letters that seem strange. One that I can easily recommend is Teach Yourself Czech.

Link to amazon. Teach Yourself is a language learning series that introduce you to languages through dialogues that gradually get more and more complex. The course has exercises, grammar explanations and some cultural reference built in, but the main strength of Teach Yourself Czech is its dialogues. The audio to said dialogues can be downloaded for free off their site. I recommend that you find a good spot throughout your day to study.

As you progress with your daily studies, I recommend that you revise previous lessons. For each new lesson you do, try going through the previous lessons from the days before. The reason is, that when you keep your study approach varied , you significantly strengthen the connections that your form in your brain for new information.

Think of your brain as a web of strings. Each string represent a memory. A string on its own is not very strong, and can easily break, but if you weave a network of strings that go in all directions — not only between two points, the connections inherently get much stronger. Colloquial is a language learning series much like Teach Yourself. The lessons are mainly based on dialogues, but it does spend some time on grammar explanations too. This can be useful as a supplement to Teach Yourself.

If you managed to find a spot in your study schedule for Teach Yourself Czech in the morning, I recommend that you try and fit Colloquial Czech into your evening routine. Or maybe you have half an hour to spend during the day? For this, I recommend that you start working with Czech sentences through Glossika.

Scroll down for a link. Glossika is a language learning program that helps you assimilate languages through sentences and repetition. And then Glossika automatically continues to the next sentence. It only takes a few minutes after all. So stick to a maximum of 20 new sentences in one go.

Do these before adding any new sentences. In the Glossika world, everything is about reps. Glossika bases the rescheduling time on something called the forgetting curve which is a mathematical model that tries to predict how long you can retain a new piece of information before it needs to be refreshed.