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Colloquial Czech: the complete course for beginners PDF

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Colloquial Czech Romanian Russian Scottish Gaelic Serbian Slovak Slovene Somali Spanish Spanish of Latin America Swahili Swedish Tamil Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish (forthcoming) Yoruba Zulu (forthcoming) THE COLLOQUIAL SERIES Series Adviser: Gary King The following languages are available in the Colloquial series: Afrikaans Albanian Amharic Arabic (Levantine) Arabic of Egypt Arabic of the Gulf Basque Bengali Breton Bulgarian Cambodian Cantonese Catalan Chinese (Mandarin) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French COLLOQUIAL 2s series: The Next Step in Language Learning Chinese Dutch French German Italian Portuguese of Brazil Russian Spanish Spanish of Latin America All these Colloquials are available in book & CD packs, or separately. You can order them through your bookseller or via our website www.routledge.com. German Greek Gujarati Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Malay Mongolian Norwegian Panjabi Persian Polish Portuguese Portuguese of Brazil Colloquial Czech The Complete Course for Beginners James Naughton First edition published 1987 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. Second edition published 1999 by Routledge This third edition published 2011 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 1987, 1999, 2011 James Naughton The right of James Naughton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Avant Garde and Helvetica by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Naughton, J. D. (James D.), 1950– Colloquial Czech : the complete course for beginners / James Naughton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Czech language—Textbooks for foreign speakers—English. 2. Czech language—Grammar. 3. Czech language—Spoken Czech. 4. Czech language—Sound recordings for English speakers. I. Title. PG4112.N38 2010 491.8′682421—dc22 2010005856 ISBN 13: 978-0-415-49631-5 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-49633-9 (audio CDs) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-49632-2 (pack) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-58827-0 (MP3s) ISBN 13: 978-0-203-87827-9 (ebk) 711 Third Ave, New York, NY 10017 Contents Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations ix Introduction xi Pronunciation guide xvi 1 Vítám vás v Praze! 1 Welcome to Prague! 2 Co d2láte? 23 What are you doing? 3 Rodina a práce 44 The family and work 4 M2sto a sídlišt2 61 The city and the housing estate 5 Hudba, jídlo, byt 79 Music, food, the fl at 6 Doprava, cestování, po1así 98 Transport, travel, the weather 7 Jídlo, šaty, t2lo 122 Food, clothes, the body 8 Telefon, den, týden 142 The telephone, the day, the week 9 Barvy, zájmy, politika 164 Colours, interests, politics 10 Pohostinství a domácnost 183 Hospitality and the household 11 Obchod a potraviny 204 The shop and groceries 12 Hotel – Kolik je hodin? 224 The hotel – What time is it? vi Contents 13 P<átelství a volný 1as 244 Friendship and leisure time 14 Obchodní dÍm a turistika 266 The department store and tourism 15 Podmínky a životní úroveî 290 Conditions and living standards 16 Restaurace 313 Restaurants Grammar summary 338 Key to exercises 366 Czech–English glossary 388 English–Czech glossary 435 Index of language points 448 Acknowledgements I am much indebted to a whole number of persons, amongst them Jana Dankovi1ová, Marie Svobodová, Vanda Pickett, and Tereza Mat2jková, as well as the students attending my classes over the years, and others unnamed here (but not ignored or forgotten!), for their always helpful suggestions, corrections and useful advice. If I have failed to take any points properly on board, the fault is mine. Grateful thanks go also to my anonymous editorial readers, my sharp- eyed copy editor Helena Power, the speakers on the recording, and all the publishing staff involved in the making of this, and previous editions, of this book. Abbreviations Labelling of style, usage, register: * common forms which are spoken usage (but non-standard in writing) coll. (a) more colloquial words, (b) less formal grammatical usage Grammar and parts of speech: || divides male and female variant nouns > arrow-head pointing forward to the perfective verb < arrow-head pointing back to the perfective verb + separates ‘single’ and ‘habitual/repeated’ verbs of motion; or precedes the case required after any word acc. accusative case adj. adjective adv. adverb dat. dative case f. feminine gender freq. frequentative verb gen. genitive case impf. imperfective verb ins. instrumental case loc. locative case m. masculine gender ma. masculine animate mi. masculine inanimate n. neuter gender nom. nominative pf. perfective verb pl. plural sg. singular voc. vocative case x Abbreviations Other: lit. literally s/he he or she Introduction The course This third edition of my Colloquial Czech is a revised version of the edition first printed in 1999. Ten years have passed. It was time to update the dialogues and vocabulary here and there, and respond in places to user feedback. The presentation of the grammar has been adjusted at various points, in order to distribute material more evenly between lessons and make the exposition of points a closer match for my reference volume Czech: an Essential Grammar (Routledge, 2005). The Czech– English glossary is more comprehensive. Letter-writing has mostly given way to emails, mobile phones with text messaging are busily in use, and computers are everywhere around us. The recordings are new, and more carefully paced, we hope. The course aims as before to take you up to a level at which you can begin to communicate with success on a range of essential topics, as well as tackle books, the press and other media (with the help of a decent dictionary, see below). The language is a hard one for English speakers, so no foolish promises are going to be made to you about how easy or straight- forward your task will be. There is much alien grammar, as well as alien vocabulary, to be assimilated, step by step, and there’s no way to avoid making robust efforts over a period of time if you want to complete the course successfully! Exactly how you advance through the units will depend on factors such as your previous experience of language learning and whether you have a teacher or not. The order of items in each unit suggests the author’s own personal approach. Take things as they come. Tackle dialogues with their new vocabulary before making a more detailed study of the new language points. Use the exercises to monitor your xii Introduction progress. Back up your progress with the short further texts for read- ing. (Most of the units contain two broadly equal cycles of dialogues and language points.) You should not really expect to get through a unit adequately at one sitting. If working alone, proceed at your own pace. The units are designed to break down into smaller, bite-sized segments. Use of the accompanying recordings is especially advisable for learners working on their own. Listen to the dialogues, after preparing them from the book. Re-read them and study the language points more thoroughly. Repeat, until you reach a level where you can follow the dialogues adequately, and tackle the recorded exercises. English versions of the dialogues are provided in the earlier part of the course, but are phased out by the end of Unit 6. By this time the learner should have become sufficiently accustomed to Czech word order and structures to cope without this life-support. If a detail here and there remains puzzling, just carry on without worrying too much, especially if you are without a teacher. Don’t expect to assimilate everything perfectly the first time round. Many things which seem hard at first will be easier when you revisit them later. Language Czech is closely related to Slovak and Polish, and somewhat less closely to Russian. Words like sestra ‘sister’ and t<i ‘three’ show the ultimate Indo-European origins of the language, shared with English, but long evolution has meant that in general Czech is almost totally incomprehensible to the English eye or ear, leaving aside those rela- tively few easily spotted loan words like sport, film or hotel which are to be found in other European languages, including English. A written form of Czech began to be employed regularly from the later thirteenth century onward. The language had already evolved into something recognisably close to its present-day grammatical shape by the seventeenth century (as indeed had English). By the later eighteenth century Czech had become overshadowed by German in education and public life, but from the time of the ensuing ‘National Revival’, as it is traditionally called, and increasingly effectively in the second half of the nineteenth century, Czech writers, scholars, activists and public figures worked to achieve a much stronger official Introduction xiii status for the language in public life within Austria-Hungary, with an increasingly vigorous Czech-language press and national institutions of education and the arts. The use of Czech became much more widespread in administration and public life, even before the creation of Czechoslovakia and national independence after the First World War, in 1918. Today there remains still a clearly felt contrast between standard written and most people’s everyday spoken norms – as if standard Czech is language ‘wearing its respectable jacket and tie’ – though you may find this contrast most evident in the usage of Prague and Bohemia, as speakers often tend to favour a more standard version of Czech in Moravia (where the older local dialects differed more strongly). Some of the differences between standard usage and relaxed everyday usage will be noted during the units, but most of the dia- logues and texts aim at a usage compatible with both acceptable speech and standard writing – a colloquial form of standard Czech. History Any language will reflect and contain the history and fortunes of the people who have spoken it over the centuries. Before 1918 the historic lands of the Czech Crown – Bohemia, Moravia and part of Silesia – were for a long time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled over by the Habsburgs, almost continuously, for nearly four centuries. After the First World War, and the fall of the Habsburg Empire, this area was the western part of the new republic of Czechoslovakia, under its first president Masaryk (with Slovakia, formerly Upper Hungary, in the east). During the Second World War the truncated Czech Lands became a Nazi Protectorate. Restored to independence in 1945, Czechoslovakia soon became a part of the Soviet-dominated Eastern bloc, ruled by Communist regimes from February 1948. The reform movement of the later 1960s was halted by the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The Czech Republic received its present political shape when Czechoslovakia split, non-violently, into its Czech and Slovak com- ponents at the end of 1992. This ‘Velvet Divorce’ had been preceded by the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’, which saw the fall of Communism in Czechoslovakia. Now a member of the European Union, the country xiv Introduction today continues to grapple politically and economically with the challenges and changes of the post-Communist years. The popu- lation of the Czech Republic is around ten million, but there are also many people of Czech birth and descent scattered around the globe. Prague as the country’s capital is of course much visited by foreign tourists, drawn by its fine architecture and musical life, amongst its other attractions, one of which is certainly the famous beer. Nowadays many English speakers live and work there, often employed by multinational companies. The rest of the country has its own special attractions: the lively second city of Brno in Moravia, medieval and Baroque towns and churches, country houses, castles, forests and mountains, ski-resorts, local beers . . . and the less familiar local wines. Czech literature has received a notably favourable reception from English readers during the last half century or so, through fiction writers such as Milan Kundera, Josef Škvorecký and Bohumil Hrabal, the dramatist Václav Havel (later Czech president), and (for some readers at least) its translated poets such as Jaroslav Seifert, Vladimír Holan or Miroslav Holub. The composers Smetana, Dvo<ák and Janá1ek need no introduction to lovers of classical music, whilst many readers have also encountered one or two earlier twentieth-century writers such as Jaroslav Hašek, author of the rambling comic novel The Good Soldier Švejk, or Karel =apek, who supplied the word ‘robots’ to the English language via his science-fiction play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Similarly, at various times in the last century or so, Czech film, photography, theatre, art and modern architecture have all won considerable prestige internationally. Some further study material It is perhaps rather premature at this moment, if you are just begin- ning this course, or thinking of buying it, to recommend the purchase of other books, but quite soon you are bound to want a decent dictionary, if you are serious about learning Czech, and for revision purposes it is often good to acquire further learning material. Here are just a few suggestions: James Naughton, Czech: an Essential Grammar, London: Routledge, 2005. (More detailed reference. Outlines the grammar in a similar way to this volume.) Introduction xv Ivana Rešková and Magdalena Pintarová, Communicative Czech (Elementary Czech and Intermediate Czech), Jihlava/Prague: Uni- verzita Karlova, 1996–7 and later printings. (Attractively presented classroom material and exercises. Look out also for other Czech- produced courses for beginners, by Lída Holá and others, in case they appeal, especially if you are visiting or living in the Czech Republic.) Thomas Dickins, Spoken Czech, Wolverhampton: University of Wolverhampton, 1993. (Video material.) Josef Fronek, Sv2tlana Obenausová and David Bickerton, Mluvte s námi !esky! Audiovizuální kurs. Glasgow: Glasgow University, 1995 (Audio-visual course.) Phrase-books, etc. may also be useful, e.g. Berlitz, Collins, Rough Guide. Amongst the more recent dictionaries, Josef Fronek’s have been well received for their clarity of presentation: Josef Fronek, English-Czech Czech-English Dictionary (Anglicko-!eský a !esko-anglický slovník), Prague: Leda, 1998, etc. Josef Fronek, Velký !esko-anglický slovník, Prague: Leda, 2000. (Large Czech-English.) Josef Fronek, Velký anglicko-!eský slovník, Prague: Leda, 2006. (Large English-Czech.) The following remain invaluable, you may come to appreciate later, for showing the ‘aspectual pairs’ of verbs. The second also offers a really wide range of vocabulary for reading literature: Ivan Poldauf, ed., Anglicko-!eský !esko-anglický slovník, Prague: SPN, 1994, etc. Ivan Poldauf, ed., Velký !esko-anglický slovník, =elákovice: WD Pub- lications/New York: Hippocrene Books, 3rd edition, 1996, etc. The following monolingual dictionary is well worth obtaining for more advanced work in Czech, as it contains many useful brief examples of idiom and usage: Josef Filipec et al., Slovník spisovné !eštiny pro školu a ve:ejnost, 2nd edition, Prague: Academia, 1994, etc.

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