Fundamental Vocabulary to Learn Czech

You will need to do some study of basic Czech grammar. However, our recommendation is to KEEP IT SIMPLE. Czech is a highly “inflectional” language. That means that (nearly) every word can have dozens of different forms.

Most Czech courses and teachers focus an incredible amount of energy on this. But it’s not necessary! We recommend you start with vocabulary first and some basic grammar. Then, spend a lot of time with Czech, understanding simple content and becoming familiar with the way words change. Then, once you’re in the intermediate stage, you can dive deeper into grammar.

To get started on your journey, Czech out our free Czech resource doc: https://refold.link/czech-beginner-materials

Yep! It just takes time, energy, and effort. The Czech deck took our team of data scientists, high-level Czech learners, and Czech natives about 150 hours to create. We’ve done the hard work so you don’t have to.

If you’re not serious about learning Czech, go ahead.

Duolingo is a language-learning video game. It’s a great way to try out a language to see if you like it and to build a daily habit of engaging with the language.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t get you very far, it only teaches a few hundred words, in awkward, formal sentences and very very slowly. It definitely won’t help you understand real Czech.

Not really! There are some options, but they have a few problems:

1. The decks for Czech are super short (maybe a few hundred words).
2. They aren’t focused on helping you understand TV shows and casual conversation.
3. They haven’t filtered out the “easy words” or cognates.
4. They don’t have native audio.
5. The example sentences (if they even have any) are crowdsourced and usually low quality.

If you want to use a free deck, join our Discord server and find the #cs-general channel (the Czech learning channel). Ben has shared some of his Anki cards there, but those are cards that he personally made and weren’t made to be an official deck.

NO! This just builds the initial foundation for understanding Czech. Fluency comes after thousands of hours spent with the language.

Check out our Czech quickstart guide for content recommendations.

Congrats 🥳! Head on over to our guide on sentence mining to learn how to make cards directly from your immersion.

One of the hardest parts about making this deck was sourcing the words. Czech is a difficult language to make a frequency list for, since it’s highly inflectional and there aren’t any good, automatic parsers.

Plus, most written Czech is from official broadcasts, formal sources and books. But written Czech is vastly different from spoken Czech. Any list based off those formal sources would be missing a very important aspect of learning to understand Czech.

So Ben did it all manually. Over the course of 2.5 years, he’s been saving hundreds of transcripts, subtitle files, blog posts and books to analyze and use for this deck.

During his learning, he manually looked up words and lemmatized them to create one of the highest quality (if not THE highest quality) frequency lists for beginner Czech learners. We haven’t seen anything close to this level of quality.

Some of them are, but we decided that wasn’t the highest priority for this deck. The focus was on creating natural sentences. But since the words are so common, once you get past the first few hundred, many of the sentences become 1T (meaning that there’s only 1 new word in the sentence).