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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent value for your money, September 25, 2001
This review is from: Colloquial Czech: The Complete Course for Beginners [book and two 60 minute cassettes] (Paperback)
I bought this book, with cassettes, before going to study in the Czech Republic last summer. Though I made it through only the first few lessons, I was surprised by how much I could still understand. Czech is a very complex language in terms of syntax, with each noun having seven cases, for example. This book, I believe, introduced this concept, and most grammar, very well. However, Czech is also a very difficult langauge to learn how to speak, thanks to a unique letter "r hacek" which is found only in czech, and typical slavic consonant clusters (some words don't even have vowels!). Unfortunately the tapes were rather sparse. While all the dialogs were read, often times there were no accompanying exercises. For example, there was rarely the opportunity to repeat after the speakers on the tape, or to take a role in the dialogs. Nonetheless, listening to the tapes regularly did allow me to impress a few Czech students and professors with my "excellent pronunciation." And for less than $..., its an excellent value, especially for someone on a limited budget. If you would like to learn the Czech language, for not a lot of money, I would definitely recommend this book.
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27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This Book Saved Me, June 29, 2005
This review is from: Colloquial Czech: The Complete Course for Beginners [book and two 60 minute cassettes] (Paperback)
I got this book years ago when I was living in Prague. I had learned some by immersion and by studying on my own using whatever grammar book I could find. What most native-Czech speakers told me back then was, "You will never learn Czech; don't even try." I rarely met a non-native Czech speaker. Most Americans there didn't even bother. But I did, but not without some struggles.
I struggled for the first six months until this book started floating around the ex-pat community. Immediately after finding a copy of my own, things started looking up. I had some bilingual Czech friends who helped me out. What they liked about the book is that it was, in their opinion, a fine example of regular spoken speech, even with amusing dialogues.
If you don't know Czech grammar, I can briefly summarize it as being only slightly more complicated than Russian. It has 7 cases of declination. At the time (1993?), I think what was so revolutionary about this book is that it didn't teach all of the Czech grammar, but just what you would find most often in day-to-day conversation, or at least what you should know at a minimum. Just to say, "I'd like a glass of water" is complicated. You can't say anything until you understand that every word in a sentence will have a different ending depending on how the word is used in a sentence. It's not enough to learn vocabulary, conjugation and tenses. Even the numbers change, depending on how they're used in a sentence.
I think it helps to live in the country to appreciate the book. I purchased the Russian version of this book, and also Castillian Spanish, but this was back in the states, outside of a live context. It wasn't the same.
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31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Important Western Slavic language, August 12, 2004
This review is from: Colloquial Czech: The Complete Course for Beginners [book and two 60 minute cassettes] (Paperback)
I got this book (no cassettes or CDs came with mine) for a half-semester course I took on Czech history and culture; those of us who wanted stayed behind after class with our professor to learn some Czech. He didn't assign any book for those of us who were interested in the optional language part, but this was the only book on Czech I could find at the off-campus textbook store. As a native speaker, the professor thought it was really good. Of course it doesn't have the most comprehensive dictionary in the back, but that's to be expected with any teach yourself language book. You have to go out and get a real Czech-English dictionary if you're inspired enough to keep learning.
Czech isn't an easy language, but I found it easier than many would, already being familiar with the Russian language. Czech is a Western Slavic tongue and Russian is Eastern, but they're maybe about 75% similar, with some regional changes (for example, many words starting in G in Russian are exactly or nearly the same in Czech, only they start in H, such as hrad/grad [castle]). And even though the accent marks over the consonants can give some people a hard time at first, at least Czech is written in the Roman alphabet. And as the professor told me, it's 98-99% similar to Slovakian, my paternal grandpap's native language, so learning Czech meant I could talk to him and understand most of what he said. Since it's so hard to find a good dictionary or instructional volume on the Slovakian language, this book on Czech is a real bargain.
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