Assimil Czech

I am currently in Paris, France, on my year abroad. Clearly, this means that at the moment, Czech is not my biggest focus. However, in February, I am going to the Czech Republic for five months, so maybe it would be worth making a few efforts to improve my Czech, which, after an entire summer of not speaking it, I have mostly forgotten. With this in mind, I headed over to Gibert Jeune, a perennial favourite of Parisian students. There, I picked up a copy of Assimil "Tcheque sans Peine". Yes, I have decided to brush up on my Czech through French. I'll get onto the whys later, but for now, the book itself. It consists of around 80 lessons that are supposed to take 15 minutes each day. With 2 years of Czech behind me, I am finding that at the moment I am getting through the lessons in about 5 minutes. They consist of a short, rather unnatural sounding conversation that is supposed to introduce basic grammatical constructs through repetition. By lesson three I have supposedly learnt how to conjugate to be and to have in the singular persons, how to negate, ask questions, and a host of vocabulary. I will have to wait until I progress to the further lessons to see just how much I am picking up from the book.

So why use a French book for Czech? Well, firstly, it's a matter of practicality. It is just simply a lot easier to pick up a French guide in Paris than an English one. However, I am also interested to see if letting go of English will help me think more directly in Czech. Using the French will hopefully get me to think more about the underlying meaning and structures of the phrases than a simple direct-to-English translation.

That's the plan anyway.