Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CZECH
The official language of the Czech Republic is Czech (čeština), a highly inflected
Western Slav tongue regarded as one of the most difficult in the world to learn. Any
attempt to speak Czech will be heartily appreciated, though don't be discouraged if
people seem not to understand, as most will be unaccustomed to hearing foreigners
stumble through their language. English is widely spoken in hotels and restaurants,
slightly less universally in shops and museums. Among the older generation at least,
German is still the most widely spoken second language.
A CZECH LANGUAGE GUIDE
There are only a handful of
teach-yourself Czech
courses available and each has draw-
backs.
Czech Step by Step
by Lida Hola is more fun than most, but has no accompanying
CD;
Colloquial Czech
by James Naughton is good, but a bit fast and furious for most
people;
Teach Yourself Czech
is a bit dry. Numerous
Czech phrasebooks
are available,
not least the
Czech Rough Guide Phrasebook
, laid out dictionary-style for instant access.
A good
website
that will help you learn a little Czech is
locallingo.com
;
for an
online
dictionary
check
slovnik.cz
.
Google Translate generally does a worse job with Czech
than with most European languages.
Pronunciation
English-speakers often find Czech impossibly difficult to pronounce. In fact, it's not half as
daunting as it might first appear from the “traffic jams of consonants”, as Patrick Leigh Fer-
mor put it, which crop up on the page. An illustration of this is the Czech tongue-twister,
strč
prst skrz krk
(stick a finger through your neck). Apart from a few special letters, each letter
and syllable is pronounced as it's written - the trick is always to
stressthefirstsyllable
of a
word, no matter what its length; otherwise you'll render it unintelligible.
THE CZECH ALPHABET
In the Czech alphabet, letters that feature a
háček
(as in the
č
of the word itself) are con-
sidered separate letters and appear in Czech indexes immediately after their more familiar
cousins. More confusingly, the consonant combination
ch
is also considered as a separate
letter and appears in Czech indexes after the letter
h
. In the index in this guide, we use the
English system, so words beginning with
c
,
č
and
ch
all appear under
c
.
