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The Little Czech Primer -
A collection of everyday words with
illustrations. Divided into verbs, nouns, and adjectives, and also indexed
alphabetically.
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Local lingo - Czech language lessons
- includes
an audio pronunciation guide, grammar overview, phrases, vocabulary,
online exercises, travel phrases,
grammar instruction and message boards.
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Basic Czech Phrases
- Includes a pronunciation guide.
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Bohemica.com
- Includes grammar exercises, games, essays, online interactive course,
and books.
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Czech
Grammar
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The Czech language is a west Slavic language closely related to Slovak.
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It is written in the Roman (Latin) alphabet.
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Czech has seven noun cases, two numbers,
three persons in the verb,three tenses (present, past, and future), two
voices, and three moods (indicative, imperative, and conditional or
subjunctive), and it marks verbs for perfective (completedaction) and
imperfective (action in process or uncompleted action) aspects.
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All dialects of Slovak and Czech are
mutually comprehensible, for there are no sharp linguistic frontiers.
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Because of its complexity, Czech is said to be a difficult language to
learn. The complexity is due to extensive morphology and highly free
word order. As in any Slavic language, many words (esp. nouns, verbs,
and adjectives) have many forms. Moreover the rules are extremelly
irregular and many forms have official, colloquial and sometimes
semi-official variants. The word order serves similar function as
emphasis and articles in
English. Often all the permutations of words
in a clause are possible.
- Czech's phonology may also be very difficult for speakers of many
other languages. For example, some words do not appear to have vowels:
zmrzl, ztvrdl, scvrkl, čtvrthrst. The consonants l and r, however,
function as sonorants and thus fulfill the role of a vowel. A similar
phenomenon also occurs American
English (bird is pronounced as [brd]
with a syllabic r). It also features the consonant ř, a phoneme that
is said to be unique to Czech and quite difficult for foreigners to
pronounce (it's close a sound that would be written as rzh in
English).
- The cases of Czech are nominative, accusative, genitive, dative,
instrumental, locative, and vocative. The numbers are singular,
plural, and remains of dual. The genders are masculine animate,
masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter.
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