Customer Reviews

Czech: An Essential Grammar (Essential Grammars)

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Really! First, use this work. I know it means seemingly meaningless memorization, but then the Short Teach Yourself Czech will make a lot more sense, and you can concentrate on the colloquial expressions and phrases. Then you can polish off your knowledge with Radio Praha (which has the printed Czech of their articles and sound in RealAudio or Windows Media) and the Fronek dictionary. The Fronek IS hideously expensive, but since you're not gonna find "2,000+ Essential Czech Verbs," you'll find all you need on the irregualr conjugations and declensions there.

The Kindle Edition of Naughton's Czech, an Essential Grammar is useless. Despite multiple downloads and discussions with Kindle customer service, the book downloads to the Kindle without many accents and diacritical marks on the letters -- for example, throughout the entire book, "R" with hook/hacek -- has no hacek. Same for "r" -- no hook/hacek. The same holds true for other letters with hooks/haceks. Thus, THE BOOK IS USELESS IN ITS CURRENT FORMAT. Without the accents and hooks/hacky, one cannot learn the language. I speak Czech and can see that all the accents are missing, but a non-speaker or learner of the Czech language would not know this, and thus would learn many, many words completely incorrectly. THE PUBLISHERS NEED TO CORRECT THE KINDLE VERSION OF THIS BOOK.

Czech, an essential grammar is exactly what it is called.
Author managed to explain complexities of Czech language in logical, brief and easy to understand chapters. I was particularly impressed by the section, cases and prepositions, which was very well presented to anyone who would be interested in studying this very difficult language. Each section covers one element of the grammar which includes nouns, pronouns,numerals, verbs, prepositions and conjunctions In fairly short sections, the author was able to cover basic usage in plentiful examples so students can learn a simple conversation in short time.
I have discussed the textbook with my student, Dr. Lois Potter and she found the book to be an excellent tool for her understanding of basic structures of today's Czech.
Last but not least positive feature of the book is usage of proper and updated forms of Czech language which does not include slang or terms no longer existing in everyday communication. While Czech language is difficult by itself, many outdated textbooks make it impossible for non-native speaker to understand complicated czech grammar. In Czech An Essential Grammar, the author accomplished a very difficult task of simplifying it. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to learn Czech without being discouraged by complexity of Czech grammar.

Val Berzinz, Berlitz Czech instructor

This is an excellent book on Czech grammar. Unfortunately the Kindle edition is missing many of the diacritic marks. For a language book this is unacceptable. Do NOT buy the kindle edition until the problem is fixed. Check the previews of the Kindle and paper edition previews for the Czech spellings of the word "Czech". The leading "C" should have a diacritic mark. An early instance of the problem occurs in the table of contents. The entry for section 2.4 lacks a diacritic on the leading "E".

If you did purchase the Kindle Edition and then discovered this you can return it for a short time.