The strange case of cases.

Aaaarrrrrrgggghhhhhh! Cases! The bane of anyone trying to learn Czech, or indeed any Slavic language. If you don’t know what a cases is, it’s basically when a language sticks an ending onto a noun to tell you what it’s doing in the sentence. Compare:

Restaurace je krasná
BUT
Muž je v restauraci

Notice how the ‘e’ has changed to an ‘i’ in restaurace? That’s because it’s changed from the ‘nominative’, which shows the subject, to the ‘locative’, which, unsurprisingly, shows location. In Czech there are 7 cases, which change for plural. There are numerous ways to ‘decline’ or form these cases. Seems like a lot to remember. However, it can be easier than it looks:

1. The ‘Vocative’ is only used to call someone, as in “Hey! Mark!” In Czech this would be “Marko!” So clearly we only use it with proper names. So really, you can almost forget about it, you’ll pick it up soon enough when talking to people and it really isn’t a disaster if you don’t use it. This brings us down to six cases.
2. The nominative is the form you’ll learn, and so you don’t have to learn how to form it, it’s there for you. Though you will still need to learn the plural. So that gets rid of half a case. Yay!
3. Many of the cases use the same endings. This is more apparent if you learn them in the right order. So really, you don’t have to learn that many forms.

Now, in the Czech Republic itself, the order the cases are taught in school is: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative, Locative and Instrumental. This is not the order you should use. You are not a Czech child or grammarian. You are a foreigner with different needs. This obscures how the cases work and how they are formed. I would say: Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Locative, Instrumental, Vocative. Why? Because:

1. You’ll need to use the accusative before the genitive or dative. There’s no point learning how to say you’re giving to someone, when you can’t explain what it is you’re giving.
2. If you’ve learnt Latin or German, this order is similar to the one you will have used.
3. This order shows the similarities between the cases more clearly. For example, the accusative is the same as the nominative in certain words, and the genitive in others, so it makes sense to learn it in between those two. The locative is formed by altering the dative, or is the same. Again, it’s easier to learn them together.

My final tip is: Don’t try and learn them all in one go! This is not fun and very difficult, plus useless. You’ll need vocabulary and phrases before you can learn the case to use with them. Space it out. We learnt all the cases in the first year at university, but we spaced it out, one case a month. Concentrate on the case for that time, learn what verbs it goes with, what prepositions it should be used after and if it occurs in any special phrases. This takes time and cannot be learnt in one go!

A useful web page. What the cases do, when you use them.

The wiki article. Shows the patterns. Useful for reference when you have a bit of a foundation.