Daily Dose of English 178
Learning Czech
Daily Dose of English 178
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about learning Czech. which is a sort of follow-up episode to yesterday where I talked about learning Spanish and my experience with that. And I figured why not continue with the trend and talk about the other language that I learn every single day and am really enjoying, which is Czech. So I started learning Czech about, oh, let's see, it's September when I'm recording this, and I started in March of 2023. No, yes, yes, because now it's 2024. So a whole year was in March, then I had March, April, May, June, July, August, September. So six more months, so about a year and a half I've been learning Czech, so yeah. And it's been going really, really well. Let me open up my numbers. Let's see, check reports this year. Looking at my time that I've spent on check, which is this year I've done 364 hours. And last year I did about 450. So, wait, 450 plus six, dah, dah, dah, would be 1,114, I think. Something like that. 1,114 hours or so. Let's call it 1,111 because that's a fun number. So that's about how long I've been learning Czech, and it's been going really, really well. So a bit of background on Czech if you've never heard of it or don't know much about it. It is a Slavic language spoken in Europe in pretty much one country, the Czech Republic or Czechia. Slavic languages are languages like Russian, Czech for example, Polish, There are a bunch of languages in this family that are relatively related, or actually they're quite related, and have a lot of similarities, whether it's in grammar, words, sounds, and pronunciation, that sort of thing. There are different languages, right? So if you speak Czech, you can't just understand and speak Russian, but there are similarities. You go, oh, that word is the same, or that word's really similar, or something like that. However, Czech does have a mutually intelligible language, which is where mutually intelligible is where they are both understandable to each other. So mutual is basically together or between people, right? And then intelligible is just understandable. And so Slovak is a language spoken in Slovakia, which is considered a different language, but it is basically the same as Czech. It has different pronunciation, different spelling, but basically everything else is the same. The grammar is really similar and Czech speakers can just understand Slovak and talk to them and Slovak speakers can just understand Czech speakers and talk to them. So it's almost like they're two different dialects of the same language, but they are classified as different languages because they're spoken in different countries. In fact, there are some dialects within the Czech Republic that sound about as different as Slovak does. So it's really a different, it's like, it's sort of like with English, how there's Australian English and American English. They sound different. and they have different words, a little bit of different grammar, but they're understandable to each other. If you speak English well enough to understand an American, you can also probably understand an Australian, maybe with a little bit of additional practice if you're a learner, but for a native speaker, it's quite easy. So that's about the difference between the two. But even including Slovak speakers though, there's only like 15 or 16 million speakers of Czech in the world, which is a relatively small language. Spanish has 500 million native speakers or something. English has a similar number, a little bit lower, plus about a billion non-native speakers. So there are languages that are way bigger, a lot of them. but it is still really cool to learn kind of because of that, right? It's big enough to have a lot of people that speak it, to have a lot of media, have a lot of interesting things, but small enough that it's very different from like anything that I've learned before or like the culture has this own sort of specific vibe for being in a part of Europe that is relatively small. Everybody's heard of Germany or even lots of parts of German culture. French culture, for example. France is very famous and popular. Spain. There's a lot of much bigger countries that sort of dominate the I guess you could say the public consciousness, right? What people sort of just think about when they think of Europe or Slavic countries. But it's a much smaller place that I think is really, it's a very different vibe from learning a bigger language, I guess is what I want to say. And I really like that. I think it's really cool. So if you are looking for a new language, picking something that is like a medium size, I think is great, right? So learning something like Swedish or Norwegian, Czech, what other languages of that size? A lot of these are gonna be found in Europe because there's not a ton of places that are have like this essentially a wealth to size ratio. There are languages of similar sizes all over the country, but one of the things that makes learning a language like Czech really nice is that it does have a fairly, it does have a fairly Basically, it's a good economy, relatively speaking, which makes it a lot more available. There's a lot more resources, that sort of thing. I don't really know how else to explain it. Some other examples from Europe could be Slovenian, Croatian. I think there's even, in that area, a bunch of languages that are basically the same. I think they call them essentially one language because it's just spoken in a different country. Romanian would be interesting, I think that's a romance language, so it's more related to things like French and Spanish, but it has a lot of influence from Slavic languages, so there's a lot of different words in there. Greek is another relatively popular one, which has a really cool script, has just a lot of history, that would be an interesting language to learn. So like focusing on these, not forgotten about countries, but like in the maybe Western consciousness, right? People don't really think about Romania that much unless you're from the surrounding countries or have like a family connection or something. And so that can be a really cool way to learn about a different culture that, I don't really know how to explain it. It's a little hard. I'd be curious to know if you have either speak or have learned a language with between like 10 and 50 million people who speak it, what your feeling is on it. Although I wonder how many people speak Romanian. I wonder if it's more than 50 million. Romanian. I actually have no idea how many. How many people speak the language or even live in the country? You could tell me just a completely random number and I'd be like, all right, I believe you. Oh, 25 million. So yeah, I'm about right. 25 million is right in that size of small, medium, but definitely not large languages and definitely not tiny. So yeah. Anyways, I'm rambling at this point. I want to talk a bit about Czech. because it is a very interesting language, like linguistically. So there's a lot of cool stuff going on in Czech that makes it pretty unique, actually. One of the, I guess, obvious things is the phonology, like the way that words are made. So like a lot of languages in the area, Slavic languages, there's lots of consonants, right? So for example, a word like the number four is just čtěší, Right. And that has a lot of going on in it. Right. There's a lot of these continents. Um, and there's, uh, and that makes it sound pretty unique first off. Then it also has some cool sounds, right? So it has this sound, um, which is a different sound than, um, and that also was a very unique sound that does not exist in very many languages at all. In fact, if I go to check language on Wikipedia, we can look up the sound. Phonology, where's this shuh sound? It's this voiceless alveolar trill sound. So it sounds like it exists in check, Norwegian. It looks like Polish does have it. Some dialects rather, it says. It's not all dialects. And then like Silesian. Where is that? I don't know. Silesian. Huh. Oh, it's spoken in Upper Sillinesia, influenced by German. It's like in that same area of the country. It's also a Slavic language. So yeah, there's basically no languages that really use this sound. And most of the languages that do, it's like a small dialect of, it's not like its own sound. Even Slovak doesn't have this sound. They just use R for everything. So čtiri would be instead of čtiri, although I don't actually know if that's how you say four in Slovak. It's just an example. Anyways, so that is a pretty unique feature of Jack, which sounds cool, I really like. And there are also these. I can't phrase words. There are also these syllabic consonants where an R takes up a vowel sound, basically. And so, for example, prst, so P-R-S-T, prst is finger, right? Prst, or skrst is through. There's actually a tongue twister, which is strc prst skr skrk, which is stick your finger through your throat, but it doesn't have vowels in it, right? Strc prst skr skrk, because it just uses rr, which is also really interesting. There's plenty of words like this. It's not that common, right? So not all sentences are like that, but you can find plenty of words that don't have these, have any vowels in them, which is cool. There's also long and short vowels, right? So you get this nice, I guess, flow of sounds, which is cool. So there's some things that are E and some that are E, some that are ah, ah. And so you just get this nice, interesting like flow of longer and shorter syllables going on and on, which I really like. It's also has a lot of grammar, we can say. And the biggest thing is actually these cases. So one of the ways that I, as I'm at this point where I'm speaking Czech, I've only started speaking a couple months ago in July, so about almost two months ago. And trying to learn how to produce all this grammar is hard. I understand it great, which is making it a lot easier. But for example, there are cases in Czech. Cases. There's none in English, really, but cases are essentially ways to change nouns to express how it's functioning in the sentence. So there's actually an okay example in English, which is the apostrophe S for possession, right? So it's like Ben's car, right? You don't just say Ben car, or you could say the car of Ben, but that Z there, that Ben's car is kind of functioning like a case. We don't actually have cases in English, but it's a decent example. And so imagine that a lot of different cases have something like that, where you change the end of the word a little bit to change how it functions in the sentence, right? And so there are seven cases in check. And that wouldn't be too bad, but there's a different like way to do each case for like every single word, which makes it really like hard to remember which one is which. I'm actually okay with the cases at this point, because there's seven of them and they're relatively easy to understand. So the first one, the nominative case is just the main case, right? Whenever something's doing something that you use that one, easy. The second one is called the genitive case and that's this like this possession thing when something belongs to something else or like a greater part of a whole That also isn't too hard to talk about right? That's good. It's useful for possession for time it because if you're talking about an hour being a part of like a day for example, right that becomes And so that one's also pretty good, not too hard to understand. Dative, again, that's when something is going to someone else, right? So the classic example is, I give a present, right? That's a sentence. I am doing the thing, the present is being given, and then the date of case is whoever is receiving the present, right? So, I give a present to my dad, that to my dad is in the date of case in Czech. In English we just use to, right? But you couldn't say, I give a present my dad, right? That doesn't, you're missing a word there in English. And in languages with the dative case, they have some sort of way to change the word dad to make it to my dad, right? So like I give presents to dadu or whatever, I don't know. And That's also easy to understand. The fourth case, accusative, is the thing that is being acted upon. So like in this case, the present is in the accusative case. There's a sort of evocative case, which is when you are talking to somebody, right? So my name is Ben, but if someone says, hey Ben, they would go, hey Ben-eh, right? Hey Ben-eh, instead of hey Ben, because it's just in the case where you're talking to somebody. Also easy to understand and know how it works. The locative case is when something is like in a specific location or it's happening in like a topic, right? So we talk about something. You would put that something in the locative case or we are in the market would also be in the locative case because it's the location. Easy enough to understand. And then the instrumental case is the final one. is when something is being used to do something else. So, for example, like cutting with a knife. In Czech, you could just say, I cut vegetables knife, right? But it would be in the instrumental case, right? I cut vegetables knife-em. And that just means that it's the way that you, the thing that you're doing is being, the instrument is being used, right? Understanding that is actually pretty easy. It makes sense. You go, Oh, okay, sure. Yeah. You use this case to say that it's being used to do something. Awesome. The problem that I have is that I don't know how to turn each word into a different case because there are so many different ways to do it. This episode is getting long, so I'm going to end on this. But one of the ways that's been super helpful for me first is actually writing out a primer, a whole little guide essentially to grammar of Czech. which if I remember I will link it in the my current version it's not done yet but I'll try to link the version that I have at time of recording in this episode's description if I remember we'll see and that's been really really helpful but I've also started doing some Anki cards where I practice all of the different forms So I have a different word for each gender and different ending, right? So I actually have four examples of feminine gender, I think four of neuter, four of masculine living, and two of masculine not living, because those are all the different cases or different genders. which is a lot, and with all of the six cases and with adjectives, I have 108 flashcards that I'm reviewing just to practice the forms of nouns. And that's only in the singular. I also have another 108 for all of the plural, which is just so much. It is, it's wild, but it's also really interesting. So anyway, so that's my experience learning Czech. This has been a very long episode. I hope that you enjoyed it. And if you are a speaker of a Slavic language or Czech or whatever, definitely tell me down below if this is the same in your language, if you've ever thought about this before, because I know that it's a lot, it's definitely easier if you just already know how to do it. But yeah, anyways, that's all that I have for today. Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to seeing your comments and I will see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one. Bye bye.
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