Learn the Czech writing system
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| INTRODUCTION |
| Gabriella:Hi everyone, welcome back to CzechClass101.com. I’m Gabriella. This is All About lesson 2, The Czech Writing System. In this lesson, Martin and I are going to explain a little more about the Czech writing system. |
| Martin:That's right! Hi everyone, Martin here. We are going to cover Czech diacritics in this lesson. Let's start with the alphabet. |
Lesson focus |
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| Gabriella:Sure. The Czech alphabet is easy to learn, because it is more or less the same alphabet as English, plus 16 extra letters with diacritics. Diacritics are the little marks above the letters. |
| Martin:Yes, and the addition of these letters is why the Czech alphabet has 42 letters. |
| Gabriella:Looking at this number, you can tell most English letters are used in Czech. |
| Martin:Yeah, you’re right. In Czech, we use all of them - just the pronunciation differs. But we do not have the sound of th or the sound of double w. |
| Gabriella:Besides the single letters, there are 3 digraphs in Czech. Martin, could you explain those to our listeners? |
| Martin:Sure. Digraphs are two letters that together produce one sound. The Czech language uses 3 digraphs - au, ou, and eu. We also have the letter ch consisting of c and h, but in Czech ch is treated as a single letter. |
| Gabriella:Now to the diacritics. Diacritics make Czech easily recognizable among other languages. Remember that there are three kinds of marks in Czech. They create additional letters and sounds. Martin, where are the marks applied? Above or below? |
| Martin:The diacritic marks are all applied above the letters. There are 3 diacritic marks - the length mark, the circle, and the small hook which looks like a small “v”. There are 16 letters with sound marks. Let’s explain what those are. |
| Gabriella:Okay, let’s learn more about them one by one. |
| Martin:Okay. á, é, í, ó, ú are the letters “a, e, i, o, u” with the length mark above. ů is the letter “u” with a circle above it. This is the only letter that uses a circle. Ž, š, č, ř, ď, ť, ň are the letters “z, s, c, r, d, t, n” with a hook mark above them. Ď, ť, ň are then a little different from the rest of the letters with a hook, because of the much softer pronunciation. And also when they are followed by letter ě, the hook above ď, ť, ň becomes redundant. Only the hook above e is needed. |
| Gabriella: Are these vowels or consonants? |
| Martin:The ones with the hook are all consonants, except ě. All the letters with a length mark including long ú/ů plus ě are vowels. |
| Gabriella:Great. Well, that’s about all for this lesson, but before we say Goodbye, let’s summarize what we’ve covered. The two most important things we’ve learned are the Czech alphabet and the diacritics. Please remember that the Czech alphabet has 42 letters, 26 of which are the same as in English, and the other 16 have diacritic marks above them! |
| Martin:Please join us next time when we explore more about Czech grammar. |
| Gabriella:In the meantime, you can check the lesson notes for this lesson to reinforce what you’ve learned. And if you have any questions or feedback, leave us a comment! |
Outro |
| Gabriella:Thank you for listening everyone. See you next time! |
| Martin:Ahoj! |
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