Colloquial Czech: the complete course for beginners

477 Pages·2010·3.29 MB·English

by  James Naughton

Colloquial
Czech

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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.