khiemtran | Czech, mate

Czech is quite a fun language to speak because not only do the verbs change according to case, but the nouns and adjectives do too. It's also got quite a nice sound to it, with accents typically falling on the first syllable of every word, and consonents held in unexpected places, giving it an odd, rolling cadence. It sounds quite different from any other language I've tried to speak and I'm sure when I spoke it, it sounded quite different to local ears from anything they'd heard either.

The grammar sounds complicated, but it becomes intuitive quickly enough. Even if you're not sure of exactly which case you should be using (accusative, genitive, dative, locative, etc.), quite often you'll still be close enough to be understood. Even just by reading signs and listenings, you can pick up quite a lot, and it doesn't take long before it seems perfectly natural that if the place you want to go to is called Staré město (the Old Town), then of course the metro station you want will be called Staroměstská. Or, if you're naming the drink you want, you'll say horka čokoláda, but if you put "I'd like ..." in front, you'll say horkou čokoládu.

This is, unfortunately, one of the places where the Chambers phrasebook I used fell down, and I don't plan on using one again. It's not much use having set phrases if they don't come with an explanation of how to vary them and quite often there was no indication of which case was actually used for a given sentence. Plus, any phrasebook that has a phrase for "we're thinking of buying a house here", but not "you have a beautiful country" is clearly not right for me.

Was it worth it? Well, clearly, in the tourist areas you can get by with Standard European (also known as English) just fine. But a dobrý den or an ahoj will win you a smile in most places, and you do seem to get friendlier treatment. If nothing else, it's good manners to at least make the effort to thank someone in their own language.

Some links that I did find useful:

Local Lingo - a site dedicated to learning Czech with a decent traveller's phrasebook included
Prague.net - a site with lots of useful travel tips for things to do and see in Prague
Lonely planet - I ended up buying the Prague Encounter pocketbook, and I'm glad I did, but this site has much of the same content online as well.