How Do you Speak Slovak?

[20-02-2007 15:28 UTC] By Daniela Lazarová

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The only foreign language which Czech television does not dub is Slovak. Most Czechs don't mind. For 73 years of the 20th century Slovakia was part of their home country - Czechoslovakia - and Slovak was their second language. TV and radio programs would flow naturally from one language to the other without any need for translation. However things are gradually changing.

In 1993 the Czechs and the Slovaks broke up, established independent institutions and went their separate ways. Although the two states continue to enjoy a special relationship born of long co-habitation, the language and cultural ties are fraying. A survey among Czech youngsters shows that 30 percent of them have trouble comprehending a fast paced Slovak dialogue and the vast majority have trouble with individual expressions. Although some linguists believe that the day may come when Czechs will barely comprehend their Slavic neighbors, Tatana Holasova, is not ready to give up so easily. A language expert at Prague's Research Institute of Education, she is now involved in a project aimed at bringing Slovak back to Czech schools.

"We learnt Slovak at school as children. Not on a par with Czech of course, but some lessons were devoted to it and Slovak texts appeared in our textbooks. We also had lots of Slovak classmates and we heard Slovak on radio and TV daily. So it was a second language to us - but today my own children have big problems understanding Slovak - for them it is a foreign language."

Although Czech and Slovak are the closest of the Western Slavic languages about 15 percent of their vocabularies and about half their noun endings differ. The Czech word for tomato - "rajce" is very different to "paradajka" and you would have trouble figuring out that a "gombik" in Slovak is a "knoflik" or "button" in Czech. Tatana Holasova and her team have now sent all Czech primary schools a voluntary Slovak language and general knowledge course that can be incorporated into any lesson and should be fun rather than hard work.

"This project aims to break through the language barrier in an amusing, entertaining and easy way. We have no ambition to teach kids Slovak but to help them gain a better passive knowledge of the language, to show them in what way the two languages are similar and how they differ - and teach them some of the basic expressions that could puzzle them in everyday life."

The Slovak community - the country's biggest minority - has welcomed the project, but Slovaks know well that the days when they could speak their native language in Prague are long gone. Most of them switched to Czech a few years after the divorce, tired of hearing people say "excuse me?"

Spell Czech: New Online Language & Grammar Guide

Novy Internetová Jazyková Příručka
New Online Language Guide

[21-01-2009 15:23 UTC] By Rosie Johnston

Despairing students often say that Czech is a particularly difficult language to learn, and even Czechs themselves have problems with it. Last year, the Ústav pro jazyk český received over 9000 emails from Czechs unsure about their spelling and grammar. Now, the organisation has launched the first online Czech handbook to help users sort their s’s from their z’s. I met the head of the Ústav pro jazyk český, Karel Oliva, to ask him whether it was exasperation which drove him to publish a grammar online:

Karel Oliva

“Well, actually you are right, but the way you put it is a bit politically incorrect. Basically, the story is that the number of emails and phone-calls we receive is rising to such an extent that we cannot physically answer all of them, or we are having a great deal of trouble answering all of them. And the questions we receive are very often the same. So we decided to put the answers on the internet, and we hope that some people will look for the answers themselves.”

And what are the most frequently asked questions?

“Basically, it’s the usual suspects. So, punctuation and capital letters.”

You said that you are getting an ever-increasing number of emails, is that because Czechs are getting worse at grammar and spelling?

“Well, I would be a little bit more positive and optimistic, and I would see it in this way: people are more and more aware of the fact that it is necessary to use correct Czech. In a private conversation it doesn’t matter, but if you run a firm and you have some publicity materials and you have some orthographic mistakes on those leaflets, then your firm loses public image.”

This is the first very comprehensive internet grammar or style-guide of its type. Would you say the internet is actually a very good way of publishing a handbook like this?

“It is much better than a written book because we can update it every day. Because once something is printed on paper and then sold, it grows old every day you have it on your shelf. But on the internet you can update it. And if there are any errors - and there are errors, we are only human - you can correct them. We can not only update the things that are there, but we can add new things, because new words are coming into Czech every day. So using the current technology we have at our disposal, this seems to be the best way to present Czech orthography and the Czech language in general.”

Early feedback suggests that the handbook is maybe slightly complicated to use. Have you got plans to streamline or simplify the handbook?

“Actually there are no plans to make it simpler. If you are a physicist then there is this law of keeping matter, or keeping energy – and similarly there is this law of keeping complexity. You can’t make complex things simpler just by putting them on the internet. They are complex, and this is just how it is!”

http://prirucka.ujc.cas.cz/