Excerpted from Central PA magazine, May 2008

“I hope for your sake that in Prague we see one cat,” my wife jokes as I extract my nose from A Modern Czech Grammar long enough to call out, Kočka! as our feline walks by. For about three months now, I’ve been cramming Czech, trying to learn as much of the language as possible in preparation for a 48-hour visit to the Czech Republic en route between the more familiar linguistic territories of Berlin and Salzburg.

The manual, which I create much confusion by calling “my Czech book,” was written in 1952, when anyone you met who had ever been to what was then Czechoslovakia was probably a refugee from there. I found the book, inexplicably, in my small hometown library, where it sat for decades with no visible signs of wear. How it escaped the purging of the card catalog for the annual book sale all those years is unclear.

I had meant only to memorize a few basic words and phrases, but once I started learning a new language for the first time in decades, I was reminded why I had chosen a foreign language double major in college long ago. Hooked, I carried the book in my pack, made vocabulary flash cards, bought audio phrase books to listen to in the car and downloaded menus from Prague restaurants’ websites and tried to translate them.

One of the first nouns I learned was kočka (cat). A cool word, I thought — it sounds so Slavic, plus it has a haček, the accent mark I once knew only as “that Dvořák thingie.” Then I learned I’d been addressing the cat incorrectly, because when you talk to a cat, it becomes Kočko! Furthermore, when a cat is a direct object, it’s kočku; an indirect object, kočce; possessive or the object of certain prepositions, kočky. There’s also kočkou, for a cat who is being used in some way, in the unlikely event that a cat would ever let that happen.

But all this is only one cat. There are also plural forms, about which I am still clueless, and masculine and neuter nouns (neutered pets don’t count), all of which can have whole different sets of endings depending on whether they’re animate or inanimate or if the root ends in a “hard” or “soft” consonant or a vowel. Nor is there necessarily one simple ending for each of the many case, gender and number combinations. Consider this handy guideline regarding just one of them, the masculine animate dative: “The endings -u and -ovi alternate for hard nouns; -i and -ovi for soft nouns. Masculines ending in -a take -ovi only. Most stems ending in -r, -k, -g, -h and -ch add -u. Other hard stems usually add -e (-ě after the consonants p, b, v, f, t, d, m, n); more rarely they take -u. A few stems ending in -r, -k and -ch may also take -e. In this case r becomes ř, k becomes c, and ch becomes š.” Thanks, that helps.

Having to navigate through rules like that, constructing a simple sentence becomes a 10-minute homework assignment. Consider the fact that the Czech word for “my” can be můj, mé, má, moje, moji, mém, mému, mým, mými, mého, mou or mých. If I ever have to say “my” in Prague, I’ll just have to mumble mmm and hope they fill in the correct form in their heads.

Pronunciation can also be challenging. Supposedly, all Czech words are accented on the first syllable. But long vowels in Czech are literally long—i.e., the syllable is drawn out. In English we often draw out an accented syllable. So accenting a short syllable, then drawing out an unaccented one produces a weird speech rhythm that my Star Wars–fan son says reminds him of Geonosian.

But at least those words have a vowel. Consider the word for fireplace, krb. Or čtvrt, which means quarter. My attempts to repeat the phrase “a quarter to five” (tři čtvrtě na pět) from my audio book in the car have degenerated into a prolonged stammer that subsequently requires wiping off the windshield.

Yet it’s worth it when a sentence in the audio phrase book finally changes from a seemingly random series of sounds into intelligible words that fit together logically, or when I understand two or three words in a row in a Radio Prague podcast. And when I do see that feline on the streets of Prague, I’ll be grinning like a česká cat. I’m just thankful they don’t travel in herds.

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