Learn Czech in 5 Minutes

Is it possible to learn Czech in 5 minutes? Not really, but have a go. Watch this video and listen to Janek and Honza who will teach you a few basic words and expressions in five minutes. It is a complicated language and uses grammatical cases to convey the function of the words in a sentence. Czech is the official language of the Czechia. It is a West Slavic language and spoken by more than 10 million people. Polish and Slovak belong to the same language family. Poles, Czechs and Slovaks can understand each other without too much problems.

Learn Czech and listen to the video

Learn the language while you listen to this video. Pick up a few phrases and amaze the locals. Being fluent probably takes many years, unless you are a child prodigy. The vocabulary is influenced by Latin and German.

To make things even more complicated Czech has 7 cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental. (That is more than in German and Greek, two languages that are considered difficult to learn) Czech distinguishes three genders—masculine, feminine, and neuter.

The masculine gender is subdivided into animate and inanimate. Add to this 5 classes of verbs, each with its own conjugation and irregular verbs and you will understand why learning Czech is a herculean task.

Almost everyone in Prague speaks English

As almost everyone born after the Velvet revolution in 1989 speaks English, there is no need to learn Czech. The older generation who went to school before World War II speaks German. The post-war generation who went to school between 1948 and 1989 speak Russian but they are unwilling to do so as it reminds them of days they had rather forget.

photo Petr Kadlec@wiki commons