Learning Czech, I decided — and I’m sure this goes for any foreign language — is like eating a mountain. It’s not so hard as long as you don’t look up. 

Various other metaphors occur to me. 

Being waterboarded comes to mind, of the type America performed on its alleged enemies. The teacher is throwing words at you in an unending stream. You gulp and try to swallow. You feel as if you're drowning. Most fall to the wayside. Nevertheless, what you do ingest adds up. 

However you think of it, learning a language is an odd thing because you are engaging in an act of transformation. You are ingesting something so as to make yourself a different person. I suppose this is true with exercise, although I’ve seldom done enough to say!

I suppose telling you about it in this newsletter puts me on the spot, which perhaps will be helpful. Six months from now, we will see how much further I’ve come. 

I’ve been here in the Czech Republic for three months. So far in terms of process, I’ve taken seven weeks of intensive classes, three hours a day five days a week. Then I shifted to 90 minute night classes, two times a week. And I use the Pimsleur app, which I love and heartily recommend. In terms of results, I can now carry on simple conversations in restaurants and with shop clerks, which truth be told, are my main Czech partners at this point. I can also read some of the signs in shop windows and on the street. I am no longer blind. 

This is all satisfying, and if I go no further, which I hope is not the case, I am happy with my minor transformation. 

On Three and Four, and Consonants and Cases.

Czech is said to be a difficult language, but I resist accepting this because it might rob me of gumption. Keeping your gumption up is important for learning a language. 

What I will say is that Czech, which experts say is a Slavic language like Russian, Polish and Serbian, is interesting. That’s the word I’ve decided on. 

It’s got four genders. That’s the biggest headline. More about that later.

It also has cases, seven of them, for its nouns. What the heck are cases? I vaguely remembered Latin has them. This means (and I know this only because I’ve been studying it) that nouns change their sound and spelling depending on their role in that one-act play called a sentence. 

If a noun is the star of the sentence, meaning it’s the subject, it is pronounced  and written one way. If it’s the object, then it’s another. There are five other cases I don’t understand yet. I think some take the place or go along with prepositions. Latin has cases. English doesn’t, right? Man bites dog or dog bites man. The nouns don’t change their costumes, even though their roles have reversed. You can see why having a case language would be more precise, with less opportunity for mistaken meaning. 

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