Choking the chicken...literally

Just eliminating aspiration (compare the pronunciation of the English tennis and Czech tenis) can get one a long way! The learner of a foreign language can get a kick out of applying the rules, say, of Czech pronunciation to English words – an activity that allows one both to realize where the difference lies and to understand the origin of foreigners’ mispronunciations in English.
Then there is the question of the distinctness of individual sounds. English-speakers may joke about Japanese or Arabic speakers’ inability to differentiate between l and r (Q: “Do you have free elections?” A: “Every morning!”), but when faced with the Czech alphabet, they soon realize that they find themselves in the very same trap. This is not necessarily because of the infamous ř sound (well, even the former president Václav Havel has trouble with it), but (for instance) because of the sneaky ch, which sounds to them very much like h. A student’s composition claiming that Petr rukou chladil králíka [Petr chilled a rabbit with his hand] is an insurmountably enigmatic utterance, for the authorial intention – Petr rukou hladil králíka [Petr stroke a rabbit] – would simply not cross a Czech-speaking reader’s mind, even though the difference is, more or less, only between the “voiced” and “voiceless” version of the same sound. The way out of the lurch is relatively simple: one need not aim at perfect pronunciation but ought to make a sufficient distinction between those sounds that the given language endows with a differentiating function.
    The second stumbling block in the foreign language learner’s way is grammar. Interestingly enough, for a native speaker, grammatical incorrectness is not as grave an offense as mispronunciation – and the student of a foreign language is well advised not to worry about it too much. As virtually anything else, the mastery of grammatical rules (or proper grammatical usage) comes with practice and, despite the numerous exceptions that complicate matters, one can go a long way by resolving to take the grammatical monster on gradually. Have you ever noticed, for instance, how those who use the “tag question” (e.g., “He did, didn’t he?”; “She is, isn’t she?”) properly in English are automatically considered better speakers than those who may speak grammatically correct English but without demonstrating the same fluency? You can achieve the same result in Czech by doing no more than observing the rule of the double (or rather multiple) negative (Nikdo nikdy nikde nic neviděl [literally “Nobody hasn’t never seen nothing nowhere” but meaning “Nobody has ever seen anything anywhere”], or by using the negative question (Nemáš čas? [literally “Don’t you have time?” but meaning “Do you have time?”]. Again, foreigners’ mistakes in English (such as “the money are”) can serve as a valuable guide as one navigates the grammatical minefield of a foreign language.
    Lastly, the intrepid foreign language learner must take on a vast amount of unfamiliar vocabulary. It may be possible to learn the rudiments of English grammar in relatively short time, but that doesn’t make one an eloquent speaker. Czech may appear an easier language in this respect, as its vocabulary is not quite as extensive as that of the English language, but don’t let yourself be deceived. I’ll never forget the blushes of a student who proudly proclaimed that he *žije se svou děvkou v Holešovicích, discovering way too late that despite their phonetic proximity, the words dívka (girl) and děvka (prostitute) are not exactly synonymous. In addition, “false friends” (familiar international expressions that, unfortunately, don’t have the same meaning) always lurk just behind the first corner. One of my most gifted students often took recourse to internationalisms any time she was short of homespun vocabulary. On many occasions, this worked just fine, until one day she proclaimed (with a straight face, of course) that in Prague, there are *hrozné poluce. In Czech, however, the word poluce does not refer to smog, as one might have expected, but to the “involuntary discharge of semen in sexually inactive males”. The ensuing blushes would seem to be the most frequent non-verbal expression of a foreign language learner...
    To end on a more upbeat note, though, it should also be mentioned that students of Czech have a knack for coining very poetic neologisms. Calling the person who cares for your teeth a zubník (“dentor”) instead of a zubař (dentist) is simply too good to be written off as a grammatically conceivable but incorrect noun. In other words, no matter how difficult, learning a foreign language is always fun enough to be worth the hassle.
Hynek Zykmund ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it )

* He lives with his prostitute in Holešovice, instead of He lives with his girlfriend in Holešovice.
* Horrible wet dreams instead of horrible air pollution.

**Hynek Zykmund is the Czech courses coordinator at the SF Servis language school
founded in 1990 by students of the Faculty of Arts,
Charles University, Prague.

***Provokator highly recommends the SF Servis intensive cz/eng programs so much so that we asked them to write this insightful perspective for us, despite the fact that they simply refuse to pay for an advert. We hope that someday they'll at least take pity on us and let us sit-in on a few courses in the future to save us from inevitable mis-commuincations like „Jdeme do Cajhovna“.

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