Learn Czech from Native Speakers

Learn Czech Basics

Language Experts agree, our courses are the most complete and thorough self-instructional language course available. Our competitors like Rosetta Stone would like you to believe learning a language is easy and fun. We think they are being dishonest. The truth about learning a language is it takes time. Repetition, vocabulary, sentence structure are the building blocks our course utilizes to teach a language. Lots of repetition drills. Dialog drills. Pronunciation drills. Vocabulary. Your investment in a language course is your time. The audio material is from native speakers and the corresponding textbook is your guide. There are no short cuts. Our Methodology, Guided Imitation, sets the student on a path to a certified level of fluency. Our courses are the most comprehensive self instructional language material available on the market.

The Czech F.A.S.T. contains Units 1 - 12 and comes with 12 CD's and a 240 page textbook or 1 DVD with audio on MP3 and textbook on a PDF file.

The Czech Familiarization and Short Term (FAST) Course is one of a series of similar foreign language courses produced at the Foreign Service Institute that are intended to train U.S. Government personnel assigned to overseas posts. The objective of the FAST Courses is to help students acquire the communication skills necessary to deal with the most common social and daily life situations they will encounter during their overseas assignments. Language forms adequate to satisfy personal needs, "how to" information, and cultural highlights are presented in a format that will encourage students to try to use with confidence the language skills they have developed.

There are two official languages in the Czech Republic: Czech and Slovak. Both languages are very similar and every Czech speaker understands Slovak and vice versa. Both are Slavic languages, closely related to Polish and Russian. With a structure very different from German or English, Czech is a highly inflected language with many case endings, suffixes, and a complex set of verb endings. However, there are several redeeming features to Czech for the non-native speaker. For example, it has only five vowels, which in pronunciation can have long or short duration. Its consonants differ a little from those of English, but most are not difficult to pronounce. In Czech, the accent is always on the first syllable of the word. Moreover, Czech verbs have only two or three tenses, which is quite different from the many tenses (twelve) of English.

In English, there are few endings: one example is the use of -s or -es for the plural of nouns; another is the use of -s for the third person singular in verbs. In contrast, Czech is a highly inflected language, with five of the nine word categories in Czech having their own sets of endings, reflecting case (grammatical usage), number (singular orplural), gender, or person.

Unlike English, Czech is for the most part spelled phonetically; that is, it is written almost entirely as it sounds. Like English, it uses the Latin alphabet, but it has, in addition, three diacritical signs: comma (a - a), hook (c - c), and circle (u - U). If you know how to pronounce each letter correctly, you should in most cases also be able to pronounce what you read. All Czech words are stressed on the first syllable; the stress has nothing to do with quantity or vowel length. This is the Czech alphabet with the pronunciation of the letters and examples of equal or similarsounds in English. The letters marked with asterisks (*) represent sounds which are rare or non - existent in English.

Unit 1 - Greetings

Unit 2 - Asking directions

Unit 3 - Public transportation

Unit 4 - Telephone

Unit 5 - At a restaurant

Unit 6 - Shopping

Unit 7 - At a hotel

Unit 8 - Culture

Unit 9 - Car trouble

Unit 10 - At work

Unit 11 - Car accident

Unit 12 - Dealing with servants