Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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83 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A highly recommendable Czech course!, February 22, 1999
By A Customer
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!
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This Book Saved Me, June 29, 2005
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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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent value for your money, September 25, 2001
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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![Colloquial Czech: The Complete Course for Beginners [book and two 60 minute cassettes]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SZ5KGT40L._SL75_SS50_.jpg)
