A few notes:  Fortunately in Czech, spelling is far more phonetic than in English, so the way a word is spelled is usually the way it is pronounced.  Vowel length is very important; it can completely change a word's meaning.  For example, there is rada (advice) and jsem ráda (I am happy; spoken by a female); also vina (fault) and vína (the wines).  The accent falls on the first syllable of a word.
 

Ultra Dull Grammar Lesson        Czech is a beautiful language (in my opinion) but also an extraordinarily complex one.  It is a Indo-European language (like English) and belongs to the Slavic branch of the family, among Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovakian, Hungarian, and several other languages of Eastern and Central Europe.  Nouns are divided into three genders: masculine (subdivided into animate and inanimate), feminine, and neuter, and there are seven noun cases: nominative (subject of a sentence), vocative (addressing someone or something), genitive (possessive; the "of" case), accusative (direct objects), dative (indirect objects; the "to/for" case), instrumentative (something is the means of an action; the "by/with" case), and locative (shows the location of objects; the "at" case).  The practical result is that nouns and adjectives must take different endings depending on their function in the sentence.  For instance, the Centrum Franze Kafky; in this case Franze Kafky is in the genitive case.  This also means that there is no word for "the"; instead the nominative case takes over that function. Most importantly, this means word order is much freer than in English; the words can be shifted around depending on the emphasis given to them.

    For more information about Czech, there are some grammars and phrasebooks available.  Alas, it is not one of the more commonly studied languages, but if you want to go to Prague, it would be useful to learn a few phrases, if only so you don't look like a totally ignorant tourist.
 

Czech  Language    Features "Czech lessons" about how to pronounce Czech sounds, including .wav files of the sounds.  I strongly recommend it, especially since they know what they're talking about!  This is part of a bigger site having to do with the Czech Republic, including culture, trivia, and other stuff.

Czech-English Online Dictionary    There's even a cute little penguin on the front page!

English-Czech Dictionary    This one is plainer, but you don't have to put in the diacritical marks.

Back to the Czech Corner.

Back to Leni's Franz Kafka page.