Bolo teaching Czech Grammar means that something has gone hideously wrong in the world.
Czech numbers are straight forward. One, Two, Three, ... Jeden, Dva, Tři,... But the noun form changes depending upon what the number is. The changes happen at 1, 2, and 5. For example, beer:
The practical aspect of this is that you need to know several noun forms just to tell about some small quantity changes of the same noun.
Each noun has 7 different cases it can be refered to by. These cases are so standardized that they are often refered to by their ordinal number:
I grabbed WikiPedias descriptions until I write my own summaries.
It helps to understand exactly what subjects, direct objects, and other parts of the language are... Because the noun cases use the different nouns to distinguish exactly the noun as that part of the grammar.
In other words, you can pretty much scramble the order of words in a Czech sentence, and decode what each part is from the case it is written in.
Each Czech noun can be expressed in 4 genders.
Maskulinum, Femininum, and Neutrum.
The fourth case is actually Maskulinum; it is split into
Masculine Animate Living Things and
Masculine Inanimate non-Living Things.
In some cases Masculine Animate and Masculine Inanimate will
have no differences, and they are just noted as Masuline.
You will find these noted as M, F, N,
as well as MA, and MI.
| Maskulinum | Femininum | Neutrum | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animate | Inanimate | ||
| M - MA | M - MI | F | N |
In addition to cases and genders, there is also a Singulár and Plurál breakdown.
The short form references to these will be SG and PL.
To further categorize each Czech word or noun,
they can be treated as
Hard (Tvrdě) or Soft (Měkkě).
This H/S T/M ending is based either upon the last character
of the word.
OR.
The H/S T/M of the stem of the noun.
To keep things in Czech, I'll use T and M for the hard/soft short labels.
So, the innocent verb, or slovesa? Perhaps that is simple in Czech? Well, it turns out that even english has some verb conjugations.... You see a tiny bit of it in this english example;
I read, you read, he/she/it reads,
we read, you (pl) read, they read.
I read versus he reads. So, a conjugation is a modification of a verb to reflect who or what is doing the action specified by the verb.
The basic form of the verb, when it is used as a noun, is called the infinitive. The verb conjugations modify the infinitive form.
With Czech the modifications are more complex than english. In total there are 6 forms that a verb infinitive must be conjugated into to get an actual verb.
Of course, it isn't a standard one-size-fits-all simple modification. There are 6 types (in 3 classes) of verb conjugation which can occur, and you need to know a-priori which class each verb uses. Oh yes, and the stem is sometimes modified, and you need to know that. By the way, some verbs are completely unique.
Czech is wonderful!
Inside each noun case, each of the noun genders are declined differently. So,
Yikes! Of course, the forms of many other words, pronouns, adjectives, etc all change according to all these variations.7 cases * 4 genders * 2 SG/PL * 2 H/S ==== 112 forms?
If this sounds a bit intimdating, it is... Yet it isn't once you start to learn Czech and grasp its fundamentals. However, we still haven't gotten to even desribing the cases, much less using them.
Every Czech noun starts in the Nominative, or NOM, N case.
The NOM case is used to identify the Subject of a verb in a sentence. The Who or the What is doing something.
In the Singulár there is no difference
between MA and MI genders.
The Akusativ or ACC or AK or A case is used for the Direct Object of Verbs. The Direct Object is typically what the verb is affecting.
I bake the cake
I == The Subject
bake == The Verb
the cake == The Direct Object
The Akusativ is also used after some prepositions and phrases regarding times / days / frequencies.
The Vokativ or VOK or V case is used to address or call a person -- to evoke their name.
Of all the Czech cases it is probably the most simple, often being called one-half (1/2) of a case because of this simplicity.