The vowels are similar to other European languages, rather than to English. Recall that Czech did not have The
Great Vowel Shift , as this essay on the complexities of the English writing system explains.
In Czech, one pronounces "i" always as in
"hit" and "e" always as in "set"
etc.
2. Translate diacritics, z-caron to zh, c-caron to ch as in chance, s-caron to sh, as shown in the table.
Even better, once you learn to pronounce Czech words, you will discover many
words in Czech which you already know from English and other Indo-European
languages.
The words were just hiding in unfamiliar orthography.
The key is to
"go with the sound". Unlike English, which preserves written
forms from other languages, Czech will modify the orthography to preserve the sound.
3. To find familiar words, listen to the sound rather than panic at the spelling.
4. Finally: Ignore the endings of words.
The endings change with case, gender, and too many other things. Unless you already know another Slavic
language, this is difficult for a beginner.
Not only are Czech verbs conjugated, but Czech nouns decline. Czech inherited from Latin seven cases, which have the function
of prepositions in English: from, of, to, about, with ..
Czech uses different endings to indicate the different prepositions, e.g. the word pa'n (meaning gentleman) has the forms: pa'na, pa'novi, pane, pa'novi pa'nem ....These are just for the singular cases.
So ignore the endings and concentrate on the beginning of the word,
in this case "pa'n or pan.";
That's it. You have just learned how to
understand about 15% of Czech words.
Now you are ready to tackle some wonderful words with no relationship to English, such as zmrzlina, which you'll see
everywhere in the summer. You won't have trouble remembering it's ice cream!
Answers to Your First Translation Quiz at the bottom of the page.
Online Help with Czech
Czech Dictionaries
There are quite a few on-line dictionaries.
Here are three Czech/English English/Czech dictionaries we like:
Links on Czech Language and Literature
1. Learn to pronounce Czech words. It's a very phonetic language. More good news: Most of the consonants are pronounced very much like English consonants. Master the few that are different, and you are on your way. Our table summarizes them.
For example, chai (tea) and jam would written in
Czech as pictured.
The words look different, but they sound the
same when pronounced according to the rules explained above.