Customer Reviews

Colloquial Czech : The Complete Beginner's Course, 2nd Edition (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This Czech-course is the best I've ever read, and I've read quite a few! It is, as he title suggests, based on conversations in which you find interesting and easy understandable czech expressions and sentences. Every lesson has a very good grammatical section, and you'll find (almost) every word in the book explained in the czech-english, english-czech dictionary. The language you learn in Colloquial Czech is the "high czech" (spisovná cestina) used in national television and radio. However, most czechs speak dialect and this may of course be a major obstacle for the autodidact student. Colloquial Czech deals with this problem exellently dedicating the last lesson to spoken, colloquial czech (obecná cestina), thereby enabeling the student to understand czech as spoken in the suburbian pubs of Prague. The one thing that might irritate the student is the laziness and indolence of the caracters. Lines as "get out of bed!" "borrow me som money!" are symptomatic of the coversational subjects. The conversations are situated in a young student milieu basically dealing with love and beer drinking. Someone might find this boring and influencing on ones own effort; I liked it though! I now study czech at the University of Oslo. I could not have done this without the help of Colloquial Czech. All my fellow students have used it too, and I know that they all share my opinion: This czech course is highly recommendable!

Maybe it's just that Czech is rather difficult, but I'm struggling getting through this book. I think that the content is great, explanation is good, but I wish there was a workbook to go along with it or more questions throughout the book for practice. I am also regretting that I didn't get the audio portion, as it is quite difficult to imagine how some of the words sound.

My boyfriend is Czech, and his mother was coming down to visit us, so I thought it would be a wonderful idea to learn the language before she got here. I bought this book in order to aide me in that mission. It didn't work. I was more confused than anything, and my boyfriend said most of that language was wrong. There are too many dialects of Czech in the small country to compose it within one book. He's Moravian and he would help me speak Czech, but he couldn't do it from the book when he explained to me what the words really meant. Czech isnt easy to learn anyway, but this book wasn't as helpful as I thought it would be.

I have already used James Naughton's Colloquial Slovak text, and the Colloquial Czech was equally useful. I would recommend it to anyone who would like to learn the language (but if you have no knowledge of the pronunciation, be sure to find the audio supplements as well, because the text alone may not be enough to give you a complete idea of how to truly speak Czech).

I never finished the set. I speak Czech a bit and wanted to brush - up also wanted a set to introduce a friend to the language. We were both put off by the content of the "conversations". The comments about the women seemed very 1950's.

This "course" is utterly useless for the traveler who wants to learn enough of the language to get by on a trip to the Czech Republic.
There is no logic or relevance to the dialogues.(You could listen to all of Cassette One and never find out how to say "Where is the bathroom?")Even the most basic language instruction (listening and then repeating phrases)is beyond the scope of this bizarre hodgepodge. Not even worth one star.