# Tips for learning Czech



## CrazyArcher

Greetings

Now when it's finally decided that I'm going to visist Czech Republic in the autumn, I thought that knowing some Czech would be a nice. 
I've looked through the Czech resources here and instinctively started to look for differences from my native Russian. I'm also somewhat familiar with Polish (read some original literature in the past), so I used this knowledge for extrapolation as well. Still, I decided that it would probably be a mistake to treat Czech as a 'permutation' of Russian, and I'd better percieve it as a language on its own. Surely, beeing a native speaker of another Slavic language puts me on higher starting point than, say, a native Spanish-speaker, but I don't intend to feed myself with illusions, using Russian only as a reference and not a basis. 
All this beeing said, here's my question: considering the circumstances, what should I better focus on? Grammar, or probably vocabulary? From the brief overview I've done, Czech grammar seems to bear traditional Slavic traits, so there are no conceptual surprises for me here. Same tenses, same declension mechanisms, just in a different package, so learning that should really push me forward. On the other hand, from the lexical point of view, I've paid attention to lots of false friends between Czech and Russian, and also parallels between modern Czech and archaic (rather than modern) Russian, which one again reminded me that those langages are far from beeing equivalent.
So, what should I do? (I sincerely admire evyone who managed to read all this till the end )


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## jazyk

Vocabulary vocabulary vocabulary!


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## Jana337

jazyk said:


> Vocabulary vocabulary vocabulary!


I agree.  You'll muddle through with your Russian-based grammar knowledge, and Czechs aren't really used to foreigners mastering the grammar anyway.


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## palomnik

Since you obviously speak excellent English, perhaps it's not out of line to mention to you that there is a book available, at least in the USA, called "Czech Through Russian" by Charles Townsend.  The book was specifically written for English speaking students of Russian that wanted to learn Czech (Russian language learners in the USA tend to be fanatics about Slavic studies and will not infrequently want to learn a second Slavic language).  The book is extremely thorough on all the differences between the two languages; it is definitely a book of serious scholarship, and not some facile attempt to fool you into thinking you're making progress when you're not.


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## Tagarela

Ahoj



palomnik said:


> (Russian language learners in the USA tend to be fanatics about Slavic studies and will not infrequently want to learn a second Slavic language).



I agree, Slavic languages are very addictive. I would learn Russian first, but, for some reasones, I began with Czech, but when I know it well (not a near future) I intend to learn Russian - so I will need a Russian throught Czech. Ah, but I am not in the USA.

But althought there are advantages, something as pronunciation of some words could be mmm 'affected', no? Besides the already mentioned false friends. 
I guess that it is something like Portuguese - Spanish for me. 

Na shledanou.:


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