Slovo Dne #4: Tučňák

Ok, so my first¨”Word of the Day” of the New Year may strike you as pretty irrelevant when it comes to general conversation, being a word you may use at most once every 6 months, but it illustrates a good point. In most languages, names for exotic animals tend to be quite similar, being new additions to the vocabulary. So we have “giraffe” in English, “girafe” in French, “girafa” in Italian and “zhirafa” in Russian. All pretty similar, and here at least, Czech follows suit with “žirafa”. However, this is more the exception. The word “penguin” has its equivalents in most of the worlds languages, “pingvin” in Russian, for example. In Czech, the word is “tučňák”. This clearly bares no relation to the international term. It is one of many words that were coined during the “National Revival” where scholars attempted to create new words from existing stems and affixes, much like in Icelandic. Which all means that Czech has a lot of words bearing no relation to English, making it even more difficult to learn. Thank you, Revivalists!

Speak Czech and help win the Cold War!

So here I am, week 3 of the Christmas vacation, still slogging through Colloquial Czech and I’m starting to… get a little bored. Sooo, after looking through my small portfolio of links and resources I have collected over the previous 2 years, I found: The FSI Czech FAST course, which aims to provide students with enough language to “deal with the most common social and daily life situations they will encounter during their overseas assignments”. Yes, assignments. It’s aimed at “US government personnel” and so teaches language suitable for an ambassador and other diplomats. This all comes with a selection of “cultural highlights”. Bear in mind these are from 1990 so refer to Czechoslovakia. Some of the cultural tips are still relevant and interesting, the old one regarding odd and even numbered flowers, for example, but some are extremely out-dated, referring to the situation under a Communist government. The language however, is well represented and includes lots of vocab and grammar, along with a lot of listening practice. And the best part? It’s in the public domain so can be found for free on the internet!  So whilst you may not want to make it your main course, the amount that is there for free makes it a valuable resource that you should definitely consider checking out. There’s about 10 hours worth of audio and a 242 page textbook, so have a look!

Happy New Year!

Hope everyone has a good new year, I shall be updating in the next few days with more Czech tips!