A highly recommendable Czech course!, February 22, 1999
Reviewer: A reader
This Czech-course is the best I've ever read, and I've read quite a few! It is, as he title suggests, based on conversations in which you find interesting and easy understandable czech expressions and sentences. Every lesson has a very good grammatical section, and you'll find (almost) every word in the book explained in the czech-english, english-czech dictionary. The language you learn in Colloquial Czech is the "high czech" (spisovn?cestina) used in national television and radio. However, most czechs speak dialect and this may of course be a major obstacle for the autodidact student. Colloquial Czech deals with this problem exellently dedicating the last lesson to spoken, colloquial czech (obecn?cestina), thereby enabeling the student to understand czech as spoken in the suburbian pubs of Prague. The one thing that might irritate the student is the laziness and indolence of the caracters. Lines as "get out of bed!" "borrow me som money!" are symptomatic of the coversational subjects. The conversations are situated in a young student milieu basically dealing with love and beer drinking. Someone might find this boring and influencing on ones own effort; I liked it though! I now study czech at the University of Oslo. I could not have done this without the help of Colloquial Czech. All my fellow students have used it too, and I know that they all share my opinion: This czech course is highly recommendable!

I've just completed this course and am reasonably satisfied by it. I was in Moravia a few months ago and decided afterwards that I'd get serious about learning the language (I was relying on my Slovak during my stay in Moravia since I found that I was being understood almost all of the time).

For its price Naughton's course does a reasonable job. You do get good explanations about grammar and there are useful appendecies at the back that'll help as quick references. While the content and tables in the rest of the book are solid, their scattered nature makes it difficult to look up as a quick reference.

The dialogues are interesting and spoken quickly. It's difficult initially to understand them without following the text, but it's natural for native speakers to speak quickly amongst themselves. After hearing them a few times, you'll start to imitate their accents and build up conversational pace when speaking Czech. If you can get the CDs, then get those instead of the cassettes. It's easier to do playback with CDs and they don't wear out as quickly as cassettes.

My complaint is that there are relatively few exercises compared to the amount of grammatical information. It would have helped if the author had created more exercises.

One way that I'm dealing with this is to work with David Short's "Teach Yourself Czech" after having had completed this course. Short's course uses lively but complex dialogues as a starting point with the grammatical explanations set up afterwards whereas Naughton introduces things gradually by setting up dialogues to illustrate the respective chapter's grammatical focus.

Short's method isn't the best way to introduce foreigners to the language, but for someone with some knowledge of Czech it works very well. The extra exercises and different dialogues can only help improve my Czech.

If one were very serious about learning Czech on his or her own, then I would recommend the Czech Fast course (12 tapes) by FSI/Audio-Forum. It was designed in the 1960s for use by US foreign service staff and it presents a very thorough and organized approach to learning with plenty of oral, aural and written drills. (I haven't used the Czech version, but I did use the Hungarian one a few years ago. I was impressed by the amount of material that I was able to learn and retain from the course in spite of the fact that I've only been to Hungary for short vacations. The FSI courses are organized and designed in the same dry but effective format. )

In sum, this is the best overall starting point. However, it's a good idea to add on Teach Yourself Czech as the second stage.

Important Western Slavic language, August 13, 2004

I got this book (no cassettes or CDs came with mine) for a half-semester course I took on Czech history and culture; those of us who wanted stayed behind after class with our professor to learn some Czech. He didn't assign any book for those of us who were interested in the optional language part, but this was the only book on Czech I could find at the off-campus textbook store. As a native speaker, the professor thought it was really good. Of course it doesn't have the most comprehensive dictionary in the back, but that's to be expected with any teach yourself language book. You have to go out and get a real Czech-English dictionary if you're inspired enough to keep learning.

Czech isn't an easy language, but I found it easier than many would, already being familiar with the Russian language. Czech is a Western Slavic tongue and Russian is Eastern, but they're maybe about 75% similar, with some regional changes (for example, many words starting in G in Russian are exactly or nearly the same in Czech, only they start in H, such as hrad/grad [castle]). And even though the accent marks over the consonants can give some people a hard time at first, at least Czech is written in the Roman alphabet. And as the professor told me, it's 98-99% similar to Slovakian, my paternal grandpap's native language, so learning Czech meant I could talk to him and understand most of what he said. Since it's so hard to find a good dictionary or instructional volume on the Slovakian language, this book on Czech is a real bargain.

Muddled, April 14, 2004

I found some of the sections okay. As stated by the previous reviewer the speakers spoke too fast. Some of the sections too advanced for the beginner

But it was muddled and unclear as to the grammar. These should have been pulled out more and explained more clearly. I got to chapter 5 and am now looking for a book that breaks the grammar down for someone like me!

Average. Difficult to use as a reference book., February 25, 2004

I'm quite disappointed with this book. The layout is disorienting and the index, well the index doesn't point you to page numbers. That doesn't bode well for looking up specific topics. There's a complete lack of refernce tables. I was hoping for something more visually organized. If you're the type who doesn't need to have information in it's place and are ok with taking the lessons as they're thrown at you, then you'll enjoy this book more than I have.

Great course, August 25, 2003

This is a great way to get started learning Czech. Naughton's book is absolutely replete with grammar, which most books like this are seriously short on. The book isn't clogged up with tons of ridiculous situational dialogues (like "My polka-dotted Zimbabwean friend and I escape the monkey-pox by chugging four Pilsners daily.") The author grades vocabulary according to the level of difficulty that each lessons presents. The book includes loads of Czech sentences with English translations right next to them so you don't have to waste time scurrying to your dictionary. Neatly arranged diagrams make learning verb conjugations and stuff like that easier. Exercises give you a chance to practice what you've learned.

Also, the book is low-key and efficient. No huge diagrams, no massive space-wasting color pictures, no silly "show me the way to the pub" exercises. In the back of the book you'll find a nifty little section called "More Words and Phrases", which includes some specialized and tourist-oriented vocabulary arranged according to subject matter (e.g., finding your way, clothes, eating, letter writing...) This way you don't have to wade through a bunch of words like "gooseberry" in the middle of a grammar lesson. There's also a dictionary in the back and a handy reference section which lays out all the grammar rules in concise form.

Excellent book. Five stars.