Learn Czech online

Not yet. We are preparing or assessing a future Czech school. Register your interest and we will contact you when the first trial lessons or courses become available.

We do not yet have a confirmed launch date. Once our first teaching dates are fixed, people on the interest list will hear from us first.

We expect to offer both formats, although the first trial phase may begin with a more limited selection.

Yes, Czech is genuinely one of the harder languages for English speakers, but it is not in the hardest tier. The US Foreign Service Institute budgets roughly 44 weeks, about 1,100 class hours, to reach professional working proficiency in Czech, the same bracket as Polish, Russian, Greek and Turkish. The truly hardest group, at around 2,200 hours, is Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The real work in Czech is the grammar, not the vocabulary.

Around 1,100 class hours for professional-level fluency, but useful conversation arrives far sooner. That FSI figure assumes intensive, full-time study with a teacher, which is not most people’s situation. At an hour a day, A1 basics such as greetings, ordering and simple questions take a few months. A solid B1 conversational level realistically takes somewhere between 18 months and three years for a self-paced learner. Consistency matters more than intensity.

Because ř is a trill and a fricative at the same time, a combination almost no other language uses. Written [r̝] in IPA, it is roughly a rolled r and the sound in the middle of “measure” produced simultaneously rather than one after the other. It is famously the last sound Czech children master, and some native speakers never produce it cleanly. Practise the rolled r and the ž sound separately, then merge them.

Honestly, yes, in central Prague. Hotels, restaurants, attractions, public transport and most shops in the tourist core run in English, and you could spend an entire holiday there without a word of Czech. But the coverage is thinner than it looks. Roughly half of Czechs speak some English and only a small minority are genuinely proficient, concentrated among under-40s in service jobs. Step into a village pub, a post office or a doctor’s waiting room and English runs out fast.

For a visit, no. For residency, often yes. Non-EU applicants for Czech permanent residency must pass a state Czech language exam at A2 level, and Czech citizenship requires B1 plus a separate Czech Life and Institutions exam. Applicants under 15 or over 60 are exempt from the residency exam. So getting by in English works fine for tourists and short-stay nomads, but actually settling has a language requirement attached to the paperwork.

Very similar, and they are often called the closest pair of mutually intelligible national languages in Europe. Both are West Slavic and sit in the same Czech-Slovak sub-branch, and speakers can usually hold a conversation with each side using their own language. There is a generational catch: people who grew up before the 1993 split understand each other almost natively, while younger speakers raised on separate media and schooling catch a little less. Learning Czech gets you most of Slovak for free.

Czech has seven cases, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental, because word endings, not word order, show what each noun is doing in a sentence. English uses position; Czech packs the same information into the ending. You do not learn them all at once. Beginners usually start with nominative and accusative, then add the rest gradually, alongside three genders, with masculine splitting into animate and inanimate.

Yes. “Strč prst skrz krk”, meaning “stick a finger through your throat”, is a real and fully grammatical Czech sentence with no vowels in it at all. It works because Czech allows r, l and m to act as syllabic consonants, carrying a syllable on their own the way a vowel normally would. It is more party trick than daily obstacle, but it does explain why Czech consonant clusters look alarming before your ear adjusts.

Yes, a good deal of Czech is learnable at zero cost. Free vocabulary lists, podcasts and native-audio pronunciation clips are all available online, along with Czech radio for authentic listening. Free resources handle vocabulary and listening well. They are weakest on speaking practice and on correcting your case endings, which is where most self-taught learners stall. Our Czech vocabulary trainer is free to use.