| Author | Posts |
|---|---|
| Author | Posts |
| February 7, 2012 at 2:16 pm #50333 | |
 g.squared | Hail nerdfighters! |
| February 7, 2012 at 4:16 pm #50355 | |
 anne | Rosetta’s stone is way overpriced anyways. Can’t really help you with Czech resources… If you can’t attend a class try to find a book that comes with exercises, exercise key and audio for a start. Czech pronunciation is quite simple, so once you have the rules down you don’t necessarily need audio to keep on learning |
| February 7, 2012 at 4:46 pm #50363 | |
 Vincent | I don’t know much about learning a language from scratch on your own, but I can be of help when it comes to Czech specifically. You should definitely get a good book to start with. Learn the pronunciation of letters (unlike in English every letter has only one way to be pronounced) learn some basic vocabulary and then try to understand stuff like declension. That’s what most foreign people have the biggest trouble with in my experience. |
| February 7, 2012 at 5:05 pm #50370 | |
| anne | The thing with declension is that it’s much easier to learn it by immersion than to learn all those goshdarn tables by heart. It doesn’t hurt looking at them, of course, but people will usually understand you even if you use the wrong form (they might laugh a wee bit, but, you know…). The Czech/Slovak educational system seems rather obsessed with grammar (my Slovak lessons consisted of me learning pages and pages of tables by heart… I’m not sure it helped), but I think if it’s a matter of learning some basics to survive in everyday settings, vocabulary, basic syntax and common phrases are much more important (… and conjugation, if Czechs share Slovaks’ tendency to drop pronoun-subjects) |
| February 7, 2012 at 6:49 pm #50409 | |
| Vincent | I must agree with Anne, the obsession with grammar in our educational system is rather significant. I remember that I as a kid struggled with writing i/y. We have bunch of rules that say when you should use i and when y, which change with declension and even more exceptions to these rules. I remember learning so called “vybrané slová” – “the selected words”, which is basically a list of couple hundred exceptions, that you’re supposed to know by heart. Imagine learning couple paragraph of random words, in the correct order, not allowed to skip any. I don’t remember them to this day and yet I don’t have really trouble writing them correctly and I write for a school magazine. The thing with declension is that most people will understand you even totally screw it up, but if you manage to learn it, you will greatly impress the natives. It’s sort of stereotype that foreign people are just not able to understand it, which I don’t think is the case. But we know that it’s hard to learn and any polite person will not make fun of you because of it. And about the pronoun dropping, Czechs do that too, it’s because we do use the declension instead. For example “He was a nerdfighter” can be translated as “On byl nerdfighter” but if you reffer to the same person multiple times you usually omit the pronoun, leaving only “Byl nerdfighter” in which case declension comes into play because saying “Byla nerdfighter”, where “byla” is feminine form of “byl” might imply you changed the subject to a different person (a female). |
| February 7, 2012 at 10:15 pm #50489 | |
| anne | (in my part of Slovakia they were mostly shocked any silly foreign (let alone from the “west” (I kid you not)) would come to their country and learn the language – however badly. “No way, you can say what time it is!” (you know, when they know you’ve been in the country for half a year xD). But I expect Prague is a little more used to foreigners.). But, yes, declension is important. And, now that I’ve thought about it for a bit, knowing enough about conjugation to be able to at least notice it helps as well (I once had a quite frustrating ten minute conversation about me not knowing Martina, until I finally realized he was talking about my friend Martin, who somehow, thanks to the miraculous workings of Slovak grammar, ended up with an “a” (and other stuff) at the end of his name)) |
| February 8, 2012 at 3:37 am #50733 | |
 Sarah | So, I’ve been learning Japanese on my own, through the internet, for the last 2 years. The most useful thing that I can recommend for learning languages is a free software called Anki, although I don’t know if there’s much Czech available in Anki. Or, you could try Byki, which is similar to Anki, and has a wider selection of languages, but tends to have either really basic or really random and obscure vocabulary. Also, if you want something really similar to Rosetta Stone, you can go to livemocha.com, which is free and has a Czech class. (If anyone has helpful online resources specific to Czech/Slovak, that would be nice, because I actually just started learning Slovak a few weeks ago) |
| February 8, 2012 at 5:32 am #50853 | |
| Vincent | What is it with people learning Slovak all of the sudden |
| February 8, 2012 at 12:36 pm #50876 | |
| anne | @glaceon For Slovak, I haven’t tried it myself yet, but slovake.eu is supposed to be really good. I’d avoid Czech resources, they’ll only confuse you if you just started out. @viniter can’t really answer that, since I didn’t have much of a choice (told my volunteer agency to send me wherever, wherever turned out to be Zemplín). But Slovak isn’t really that bad a choice. Supposedly it’s easier for Polish speakers to understand Slovak than Czech, it’s the West Slavic language closest to the East Slavic languages, and imho gives a good start to the South Slavic ones as well. @gsquared seconding Anki, and/or Learning With Texts, any spaced repetition program, really. But unless you find the vocab for whatever book you’re using I’d recommend making your own flashcards. |
| February 12, 2012 at 2:16 am #52466 | |
 Rhiannon | byki.com is a great place to get some vocabulary down! You download it to your computer, and it gives you lists of related vocabulary and phrases to learn in three steps: learning, recognition of English, recognition of original language. It can also teach you to type in that language. It comes with built-in audio of native speakers. It also has an online community of users who make lists (separated by language). Unfortunately, you can only make your own list if you buy the full product. On the other hand, it also tells you when certain items are “stale”, so it can automatically pick items for you to “refresh”. |
| February 15, 2012 at 5:57 am #54939 | |
 Karina | Here are some brief descriptions and reviews of some teach yourself materials: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/czech/index.html#ressources I find the whole website very helpful for learning languages in general, especially the forum. |
. Once you have the basics down use online resources (read newspapers, watch videos/movies, listen to music etc.) to get a better feel for the language. (If you tell me what kind of music you like I might be able to give some (oldish) pointers).
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