Strč prst skrz krk is a complete Czech sentence. It means "stick a finger through your throat", it contains no vowel letters at all, and Czechs enjoy watching foreigners try to say it. Take it as a fair preview of what happens when you learn Czech: the spelling turns out to be on your side, and the real work lies elsewhere, in the endings.
The short version of how to do it: get the sounds right in the first week, learn every noun together with its gender, let the seven cases arrive one at a time instead of as a wall chart, and start listening to the way people actually talk by the second month. Twenty to thirty minutes a day beats a heroic Sunday. For scale, the US Foreign Service Institute, which rates languages by how long English speakers need, puts Czech in its third category: about 44 weeks of full-time study for professional working proficiency. Renting a flat in Brno or chatting with your partner's grandmother takes a good deal less.
Where Czech is spoken, and what it is related to
Czech is the national language of the Czech Republic and the mother tongue of a little over ten million people. Smaller communities live in neighbouring countries, and descendants of nineteenth-century emigrants keep some Czech alive in Texas and the Midwest. It has been an official language of the European Union since 2004.
It belongs to the West Slavic branch, together with Slovak, Polish and the Sorbian languages of eastern Germany. Slovak is close enough that Czechs and Slovaks talk to each other in their own languages without much trouble; if it's next on your list, our guide to learning Slovak covers the differences. Polish is a cousin you understand in fragments, which is a good reason to learn Polish after Czech rather than alongside it.
The alphabet: 42 letters, all of them honest
Czech uses the Latin alphabet with diacritics, 42 letters if you count ch, which is a letter in its own right and comes after h in the dictionary. The háček, the little hook in č, š, ž and ř, changes the sound of a consonant: č is the "ch" in "church", š is "sh", ž is the "s" in "measure". The čárka, the acute accent in á, é, í, ó, ú and ý, and the kroužek, the ring in ů, make a vowel long.
Two things matter more than the letters. Stress always falls on the first syllable, so you never have to guess. And vowel length is independent of stress and changes meaning: byt is a flat, být is the verb "to be". English speakers stretch stressed vowels and clip the rest; Czech doesn't.
Then there is ř, a rolled r with a "zh" buzz running through it, as in tři (three) and řeka (river). It is often among the last sounds Czech children master, so give yourself months. People will understand tři with a plain r. They'll just know you're new.
Czech grammar: the pleasant surprises and the endings
The surprises come first. Czech has no articles, so there's no "the" or "a" to choose. Spelling is regular. Plenty of modern vocabulary is international (telefon, banka, autobus), and English borrowed robot from Czech: it comes from a 1920 play, built on robota, the old word for forced labour.
Then the endings. Nouns have three genders, with masculine split into animate and inanimate, and seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental. Each case changes the ending of the noun and of any adjective in front of it. Meet them one at a time:
- Accusative, for the things you want: voda (water) becomes chci vodu, "I want water".
- Locative, for where you are: Praha becomes v Praze, "in Prague", and Brno becomes v Brně.
- Vocative, for calling people: Petr becomes Petře, and pan doktor, when you speak to him, becomes pane doktore.
Numbers pick cases too, which confuses every beginner in a pub: jedno pivo, dvě piva, pět piv. One beer, two beers, five beers, three different endings.
Verbs come in pairs for aspect, one for an action in progress or repeated, one for an action completed: psát and napsat (to write), kupovat and koupit (to buy). Learn each pair as two words from the start.
Textbook Czech and the Czech in the pub
Standard written Czech, spisovná čeština, is the right place to start, and it's what courses teach. Some of them, though, treat what you hear in a Prague pub as slang or error. Then you arrive and find that most people in Bohemia speak common Czech, obecná čeština, most of the time, and it changes some of the most frequent endings:
| Textbook Czech | What you hear | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| velký | velkej | big |
| dobré pivo | dobrý pivo | good beer |
| mléko | mlíko | milk |
| okno | vokno | window |
| s kamarády | s kamarádama | with friends |
You don't need to speak like this, certainly not in a job interview, but you do need to understand it. Two small ones to learn straight away: jo is the everyday "yes", and Czechs also say no to mean "yeah", which produces some memorable misunderstandings. Moravia, in the east, has regional speech of its own, so the table is mostly a Bohemian picture.
First Czech words
- Dobrý den: hello, literally "good day", for shops, offices and neighbours
- Ahoj: hi, and also bye, for friends and family
- Děkuji, in speech usually děkuju: thank you
- Prosím: please, and also "here you are" and "sorry, what?"
- Ano and ne: yes and no
- Promiňte: excuse me, sorry
- Nerozumím: I don't understand
- Mluvíte anglicky?: do you speak English?
- Na shledanou: goodbye
- Na zdraví: cheers
How to learn Czech in your first month
- Week 1: sounds and greetings. Learn what each diacritic does, read Czech aloud for ten minutes a day, and drill the words above.
- Week 2: nouns with genders. Forty everyday nouns, each with its gender, the present tense of být (jsem, jsi, je, jsme, jste, jsou) and of mít, "to have" (mám, máš, má), and the numbers to twenty.
- Week 3: the accusative. It's the case you need to order, buy and ask for things. Write five short sentences a day about what you want, have and like.
- Week 4: places and real speech. Add the locative for where things are (v Praze, v práci, "at work") and watch half an hour of Czech television with Czech subtitles, listening for the endings in the table.
By the end of the month you'll be partway through A1 on the CEFR scale. Not conversational yet, but able to hear where one word ends and the next begins.
How Qlango helps with the cases
Qlango teaches Czech across the whole CEFR scale, from A1 to C2, the level the Council of Europe calls mastery, so you can stay with one course from your first lesson to the top of the scale. Lessons are short, and spaced repetition brings every new word back just before you would forget it. The answer modes move from picking the right word out of four to building sentences and writing them yourself, which is where the cases settle in: you have to choose vodu over voda, not just recognise it. When an ending makes no sense, the AI teacher in Premium explains it as often as you ask, with fresh example sentences. And when you need a break, Word Duel lets you play against friends or other learners.
When you add the course, you choose the language you learn through. It can be your native language or a language you want to strengthen; the table of languages and levels shows all 80.
Jedno pivo, dvě piva, pět piv: one round, three endings. Start Qlango's A1 course tonight, and by the time you can order all three correctly, strč prst skrz krk will feel like a party trick you've earned.
