Shouldn't this be dvacet dvě holek?

Disclaimer: this post isn't really a question, I just wanted to share my experience learning Czech and hear about other people's :)

Ahoj všichni! I'm a native Spanish speaker from South America living in the Czech republic since last year. However, I just started studying seriously in January. I enrolled in a free Czech course at the Integration Centre for Foreigners (A1.1), bought the Čeština expres textbooks and started watching YouTube videos, series and films in Czech, with Czech subtitles, as well as using Anki to expand my vocabulary and (indirectly) learn grammatical stuff.

To be honest, I wasn't really satisfied with the idea of taking a whole semester (February to June) just to finish half of A1. At that pace, it would take me two full years just to complete the A2 level, and I can't wait that much. So I decided I would study by myself as much as possible, but still attend my Czech classes to solve any doubts and have more speaking practice with a real teacher and classmates. My first idea was to study everything up to the B1 level in a year, but I quickly realized that this wouldn't be possible for me.

It was mostly a matter of lack of time, as I'm studying for my bachelor's degree and working a part-time job. Plus, the first months were particularly hard: I'd get headaches just by trying to read the Čeština expres main textbooks. All of the instructions were in Czech, and I constantly needed to translate them in order to be able to do the exercises. I think this helped me get more used to the language, but as a non Slavic speaker, it was very difficult to start. Eventually, though, I found my pace, and I had studied the whole first book (A1.1) by the end of March, although I continued reviewing it in my Czech classes (which, as I said, were going to cover only the A1.1 level).

In April, I got the second Čeština expres textbooks (A1.2) and started studying it by myself. Surprisingly, it was much easier for me than the first one. I didn't need to translate as often as before and I could recognize a lot of vocabulary, both from the previous textbook and from what I had learned so far by watching Netflix series in Czech and using Anki.

I was very happy with my progress so far, although I was not sure about signing up for A1.2 at the Integration Centre because this course would start in September, and according to my learning pace, I would probably be finishing studying the third Čeština expres textbooks (A2.1) by this time. Also, my current course will finish by the end of June, and then I wouldn't have any Czech classes in July or August, which I thought would be a waste of time.

Lucky me, I found another option at the Integration Centre of another city (Prague). They allowed me to take an online test in May, and even though I was still in the middle of the Čeština expres 2, I was able to do well enough that they allowed me to register for the A2.1 level! This corresponds to the third Čeština expres book, which I haven't even bought yet.

My classes will start by the end of this month, and I'm pretty excited. At this pace, I will be able to finish all levels up to A2.2 by December of this year, and start studying for B1 in the beginning of 2027. My overall goal is to reach B2 or even C1, although that will still take some time.

Also, it's very nice to learn Czech while living in the Czech republic, because it feels like I'm unlocking a whole different city that I didn't know about when I'm suddenly able to understand random things on the streets, such as shop signs, film advertisements, and a long etcetera :D

PS: To be honest, I think I would have been able to start studying for B1 this year if I had more time, but I'm happy with my current progress and rhythm, especially since Czech is such a difficult language. I will also get a conversation partner soon, so I can practice my speaking skills more (this is the point where I'm probably the weakest: as an autodidact, I focus much more on comprehension than on language production, whether writing or speaking).

After completely failing my Czech assignment on building the plural form of nouns, I decided to take a data-driven approach: parse the entire MorfFlex CZ 2.1 linguistic dataset using Morph and create a queryable database (126 million rows!), select all nouns in the nominative case, categorise every one of them by gender, and extract the actual plurality patterns used in the language.

Here's what I found.

The Data

Total: 808 distinct plural transformation patterns.

A note on the data: MorfFlex is comprehensive and includes many systematically derived forms. For example, almost any verb can become a neuter verbal noun ending in -í (psát -> psaní), and adjectives regularly form abstract feminine nouns in -ost (krásný -> krásnost). So the raw counts are inflated for these patterns - but the rules themselves are still productive and useful to know!

The actual rules

Neuter

Neuter is probably the easiest to learn.

Words ending in -í stay the same. This covers verbal nouns (přání, stavení) and place names (náměstí, nádraží). Singular and plural are identical.

Words ending in -o change to -a. Standard hard neuters: okno becomes okna, město becomes města, jablko becomes jablka.

Words ending in -e or -ě stay the same. Soft neuters like moře, pole, and place words like hřiště don't change.

Latin -um becomes -a. Borrowed words like muzeum become muzea, centrum becomes centra, stipendium becomes stipendia.

Baby animals are special: -e/-ě becomes -ata. This is definitely the cutest pattern. Kuře (chick) becomes kuřata, kotě (kitten) becomes koťata, štěně (puppy) becomes štěňata. Even kníže (prince) follows this pattern and becomes knížata.

Greek words ending in -ma add -ta. Words like téma become témata, drama becomes dramata.

Feminine

The -ost rule: just add -i. Abstract nouns like možnost become možnosti, radost becomes radosti. Very predictable once you recognize the ending.

Hard feminines: -a becomes -y. Pretty simple pattern. Žena becomes ženy, kniha becomes knihy, škola becomes školy.

Soft feminines stay the same. Words ending in -e or -ě don't change: ulice stays ulice, restaurace stays restaurace, přítelkyně stays přítelkyně.

Masculine inanimate

Hard consonants take -y. Hrad becomes hrady, strom becomes stromy, most becomes mosty. In my data, endings like -n, -t, -k, -r, -l, -s, -d each covered thousands of nouns.

Soft consonants take -e. Stroj becomes stroje, pokoj becomes pokoje, koš becomes koše.

Latin -ismus drops the -us. Turismus becomes turismy, organismus becomes organismy.

Diminutives with -ek lose the e. This can catch you off guard. Háček becomes háčky (not háčeky), stolek becomes stolky, dárek becomes dárky.

Same with -ec: the e disappears. Tanec becomes tance, konec becomes konce.

Masculine animate

This is where it gets a bit complicated. Despite having the fewest nouns (15,834), this gender has the most patterns (306). But there's logic to it.

Hard consonants + i, but with softening. When you add -i, hard consonants change and become soft:

• k becomes c: člověk becomes lidé (ok that one's irregular), but žák becomes žáci

• h becomes z: vrah becomes vrazi, soudruh becomes soudruzi

• ch becomes š: Čech becomes Češi

• r becomes ř: doktor becomes doktoři

Soft consonants just add -i, no changes. Milionář becomes milionáři, muž becomes muži, hledač becomes hledači. The consonant is already soft, so nothing extra happens.

Words ending in -l take -é. Učitel becomes učitelé, přítel becomes přátelé, ředitel becomes ředitelé.

The -ista crowd takes -isté. Professions and ideologies: specialista becomes specialisté, fotbalista becomes fotbalisté, turista becomes turisté. (Colloquially, recognise you'll also hear -isti.)

The formal -ové ending. Used for professions and titles when you want to sound respectful: geolog becomes geologové, kolega becomes kolegové.

Words ending in -ec/-ce become -ci. Sportovec becomes sportovci, zástupce becomes zástupci.

The interactive guide

I turned all of this into a detailed educational article with interactive examples where you can type any noun and see its plural form explained:

How to Build Plural Form of Czech Nouns

If you're hungry for technical details

I queried nominative case nouns grouped by lemma and gender, extracted the singular/plural transformation by finding the common prefix and comparing endings, and then counted pattern frequencies. Used reservoir sampling to get representative examples across the alphabet instead of just words starting with A. Happy to share CSV files with a detailed breakdown if someone is interested or even query some data for you :D

Hope this helps someone!!

Hello all!

I am trying to learn the Czech language. In my area there are not rally real life courses so i try to learn it with duolingo. It is a bit harder because i need to learn Czech to English but i am from the netherlands.

Is it normal that they learn me to change names in some sentences?

Thanks in advance!

I still struggle with typing those tricky lil ď, ň, ť tho T-T

Hopefully this is a good place to ask this question. We're going on holiday to Prague soon, and my daughter has a nut allergy. Whenever we go to a non-English as a first language country we always take an allergy card like this to try to ensure the information is fully understood.

We've Google translated it into Czech, but want to be sure it is correct.

Can anyone let me know if it gets the required information across clearly and without confusion, i.e. that she has a nut allergy and can't eat them?

Thanks in advance!

So I am doing this in DuoLingo and I got a little confused. Shouldn't it be Nejsem hlad ale jsem zizen? Or is there a reason why Mam/Nemam was used in this instance? I thought Ma/Mam/Nemame/Mame roughly translate to have or do not have.

I made a czech verb cheat sheet for the regular verb endings (ex. Mluvit -> Mluvím). It's made to look as beginner friendly as possible and it's worked pretty good for me so far. Lemme know if I made any mistakes I should fix if any. :3

(p.s. the parentheses in the 2nd ending column are just for the -ovat verbs & also be aware of irregular verbs!!! I put a list of irregular verbs in comments too :P)

Greetings. :)

The screenshot you're seeing above is claimed to come from a Czech book about tanks. The whole thing looks very dubious (the tank drawings are unrealistic), so I did some research and it turns out the screenshot is a photoshop, probably created for a tank video game.

Anyway, I've contacted some Czech people and it turns out that multiple language errors exist in the screenshot. It's clear the text was written by someone who doesn't speak Czech, using an online translation engine.

From what I've been told, there are at least 3 language errors:

1. The word navržených is grammatically incorrect here. The sentence is supposed to say "According to Czechoslovak archives, [the tank] was designed in 1948", but instead it sounds like the archives were designed.

2. The word automatická is wrongly used and should instead be automatického.

3. The Soviet Union is wrongly abbreviated as USSR, while the only correct Czech form is SSSR, right? I noticed this one myself without even speaking Czech by simply taking a look over Czech Wikipedia.

---

Can you guys please confirm these 3 language errors? Are there any other ones?

Thank you. :)

No question, just wanted to brag about my success 😃

I started learning very actively 2 months ago and couldn't pronounce this damn čtyři, let alone čtyřicet. I could hit a good Ř if I really focused but čtyři kept coming out like čtyrži. This week I noticed I can now effortlessly produce the ř sound like a native! 😎

Ahoj!

So this started with a simple moment. My mentor casually said, "I wonder how frequently Czechs use irregular verbs in everyday speech." It was a rhetorical question. But I'm an engineer, so I took it literally.

One weekend rabbit hole later, I had transcribed 547 hours of Czech podcasts, run all 4,923,733 words through Morph (a Czech morphological analyzer and my personal learning assistany I've been building), dumped everything into a database, and wired up some dashboards.

Big disclaimer: this is NOT a serious scientific study. It's a weekend fun project. The data comes only from podcasts, so it's biased - podcasts are mostly people talking, discussing, explaining things. You won't find much imperative or vocative here compared to, say, real-life conversations with your kids. Still, I think the results are pretty interesting and maybe even useful if you're learning Czech.

Here are the interactive dashboards if you want to poke around:
General dashboard - overall stats, case/gender distributions, top 50 words by category
Verbs dashboard - verb aspect, tense, verb classes, top verbs per class

Some quick numbers first:

Out of ~4.9 million words spoken, there were 153,479 unique word forms. The most frequently used word? "to" - showing up 115,418 times. If you've ever noticed Czechs saying "to je...", "to je fakt...", "to znamená..." every other sentence - the data confirms it :)

Back to the original question - irregular verbs.

Here's the verb class breakdown:

• Irregular: 43.6%

• 1st Class: 24.4%

• 4th Class: 14.0%

• 5th Class: 11.9%

• 3rd Class: 9.7%

• 2nd Class: 3.7%

Nearly half of all verbs in spoken Czech are irregular. Gotta learn them real good!

Other stuff I found interesting:

Aspect - imperfective wins:

• Imperfective: 79.3%

• Perfective: 20.0%

People in podcasts mostly talk about ongoing stuff, opinions, habits. Makes sense.

Tense - present dominates:

• Present: ~63%

• Past: ~36.5%

• Future: barely there

Spoken Czech lives in the present. Past matters too, but the future tense barely shows up. (Again, podcast bias - people describe and explain more than they plan.)

Cases - Nominative is almost half:

• Nominative: 48.8%

• Accusative: 18.7%

• Genitive: 18.6%

• Dative: 8.86%

• The rest (Instrumental, Locative, Vocative): ~5%

So Nominative + Accusative + Genitive = ~86% of all case usage. If you're overwhelmed by 7 cases, that's your priority list right there.

Gender - feminine nouns show up the most:

• Feminine: 37.4%

• Neuter: 21.7%

• Masculine inanimate: 12.5%

• Mixed: 11.3%

• Masculine animate: 10.6%

• Masculine: 6.62%

If I had to turn this into learning advice (very non-scientific advice, lol):

1. Learn the irregular verbs first - they're the most common ones despite being "irregular"

2. Focus on Nominative, Accusative, and Genitive - that's 86% of cases in speech

3. Don't stress about perfective aspect too early - 80% of spoken verbs are imperfective

4. Get comfortable with feminine declension patterns - they come up the most

About Morph

I built Morph because I needed it myself while learning Czech. It's a free morphological analyzer - paste any Czech text and it breaks down every word (part of speech, case, gender, number, tense, everything). Free forever for everyone, no ads :)

If you find the dashboards fun or have questions, happy to chat. And if you have ideas for what else to visualize - I'm all ears!

I suppose there is a standard word order that is usually used in formal writing, but I don't think that altering it is such serious mistake. Or am I wrong here?

Found this image recently. In Slovak we call bf and gf like frajer and frajerka and these ones have way more sense!

Hi all, first post here but I’ve been tracking for a while.

Just wanted to ask how this works so I can understand it in my head. I’m trying to understand how “Je čtvrt na dvě” is “its quarter past one.” I don’t understand how dvě would fit into this wording when the hour is one.

To me it looks like “it is a quarter past two.” Or even “it is a quarter until two”, thought I believe “je tři čtvrtě na dvě” would actually be “its is quarter to one/two” (still not sure on which it would actually be considering the sentence structure)

Firstly want to check duo is right and secondly, is there a different way I can say this in my English brain that makes it easier to retain how to phrase this?

Thanks for the help!

Hi, I'm learning Czech with Duolingo, but I am currently struggling with the words "k", "na" and "do" since the little green bird does not want to explain anything to me. Are there any rules when to use which one of them?

Ahoj všichni — I've been working on a side project called Molibooks (molibooks.com). It's a bilingual reader for Czech classics in the public domain — Čapek, Těsnohlídek, Polaček, Vančura, etc. — with tap-to-translate at the sentence level and the original illustrations restored.

15 books are up so far, ranging A2 to C1. It's free, no signup, no ads.

I'm a solo dev based in Prague, not a native Czech speaker, so I'd really value feedback from people actually learning the language:

• Does the level labeling feel accurate when you read?

• Anywhere the English translation feels off or misleading? (translations are AI-assisted, so I'm actively hunting errors)

• What's missing that would make you actually use this?

Happy to answer anything in the comments.

It was a great challenge, I improved my vocabulary A LOT. But it'd be better if I understood the plot, cuz rn I think that Frank betrayed Sallieri, cuz Don killed Frank's dog xD Did he tho? :"D
Wanna see how I try to understand the final? I'll start soon here https://www.twitch.tv/chilliria/videos

Section 4, Unit 17

Why shouldn't have happened something to the dogs in the bathroom?

I know Duolingo is not the best, but the only free learning option. Since I'm living in Germany near the border to Czechia I'm often there and talking Czech which helps more than Duolingo.

I’m a very early beginner so I might just not get it but I thought it was supposed to be either « Ona je Česká  » or “Je Česká”