All our course material comes directly from NTIS, notice their price is $240, our price is $19.95!

 

Learn Czech Language

Language Experts agree, our courses are the most complete and thorough self-instructional language course available. Repetition, vocabulary, sentence structure are the building blocks our course utilizes to teach a language. Lots of repetition drills. Dialog drills. Pronunciation drills. Vocabulary. The audio material is from native speakers and the corresponding textbook is your guide. Our Methodology, Guided Imitation, sets the student on a path to a certified level of fluency. We no longer sell our courses in Volume I and Volume II, so there's no up sell for the next level. You will receive the entire course material, on DVD, for the lowest price we can afford to produce, $19.95. Our shipping cost is $5.45 for domestic shipping and $16.45 for international shipping, which is the exact price we pay the U.S. Postal Service to ship priority mail. We do not make money off of shipping, and ship priority mail because it is the fastest and least expensive way to ship. The DVD will play in both a PC or MAC, and the audio can easily be saved to an IPOD or other MP3 device. You will need Adobe Reader to access the PDF textbook.

Our Value Proposition

The Czech F.A.S.T. Course, as you can see, sells for $240 from NTIS, the United States printing service for audio/visual materials; however, they only sell it on audio cassette as you can see from our screen capture of their shopping cart. We purchased the material from NTIS, as evidenced by the screenshot provided of the original Czech F.A.S.T. Course Audio Cassettes, and did the remastering work. We had the textbook professionally digitized into a PDF file. And then we spent countless hours remastering the cassette to a digital form, now we are providing this course to you for less than 10% of the cost of original material. Only $19.95!

Our Quality Proposition: It's all about the Remastering!

We used Tascam Pro Audio equipment to do the initial digital remastering from cassette to compact disc. Once completed, we converted the compact discs into an uncompressed WAV file. We copied what would have been on Side B of the Cassettes, to the end of Side A, creating one continous file, saving again as a WAV file. We used audio software, like Nero and Audacity, to clean up the audio even more. This multi step process includes converting the mono file to stereo, normalizing the volume across the entire WAV file, removing "clicks and pops", doing a low frequency filter, then a high frequency filter, truncating silences to 3 seconds to ensure the audio is quick to begin and end without dead space, normalized the volume again, and outputting the file as another WAV file. We used an MP3 encoder to convert the WAV file to an MP3 file, and we tagged all files with Subject, Title, Copyright, Volume I, Volume II data.

What does all this mean?

The remastering process and filter work means that silence sounds like silence. And in this case, silence truly is golden. Our product is of unparalleled quality, and we can honestly make the claim that no one has spent more time making these courses sound as good as our courses sound. We have provided significant improvements to the sound quality versus the original masters, and even the material we were selling just a year ago, thanks to current technology. All you have to do is open our files in a sound editor and see that silence is a straight line, not wavy, and this means clarity.

About the Czech F.A.S.T. Course

The Czech Familiarization and Short Term (FAST) Course is one of a series of similar foreign language courses produced at the Foreign Service Institute that are intended to train U.S. Government personnel assigned to overseas posts. The objective of the FAST Courses is to help students acquire the communication skills necessary to deal with the most common social and daily life situations they will encounter during their overseas assignments. Language forms adequate to satisfy personal needs, "how to" information, and cultural highlights are presented in a format that will encourage students to try to use with confidence the language skills they have developed.

There are two official languages in the Czech Republic: Czech and Slovak. Both languages are very similar and every Czech speaker understands Slovak and vice versa. Both are Slavic languages, closely related to Polish and Russian. With a structure very different from German or English, Czech is a highly inflected language with many case endings, suffixes, and a complex set of verb endings. However, there are several redeeming features to Czech for the non-native speaker. For example, it has only five vowels, which in pronunciation can have long or short duration. Its consonants differ a little from those of English, but most are not difficult to pronounce. In Czech, the accent is always on the first syllable of the word. Moreover, Czech verbs have only two or three tenses, which is quite different from the many tenses (twelve) of English.

In English, there are few endings: one example is the use of -s or -es for the plural of nouns; another is the use of -s for the third person singular in verbs. In contrast, Czech is a highly inflected language, with five of the nine word categories in Czech having their own sets of endings, reflecting case (grammatical usage), number (singular orplural), gender, or person.

Czech Drills are recorded first for listening, then for familiarization through repetition, and finally for participation. During the participation step, when the student performs the required manipulation, his utterances are confirmed on the audio immediately following the space provided for his participation.

Czech Drills are generally in two groups in any unit: a) variation drills on pattern sentences, which provide opportunities for the student to develop flexibility in the use of patterns already memorized, and b) grammar drills, which are intended to provide practice for the student in the operation of the patterns explained in the immediately preceding grammar notes.

Unlike English, Czech is for the most part spelled phonetically; that is, it is written almost entirely as it sounds. Like English, it uses the Latin alphabet, but it has, in addition, three diacritical signs: comma (a - a), hook (c - c), and circle (u - U). If you know how to pronounce each letter correctly, you should in most cases also be able to pronounce what you read. All Czech words are stressed on the first syllable; the stress has nothing to do with quantity or vowel length. This is the Czech alphabet with the pronunciation of the letters and examples of equal or similarsounds in English. The letters marked with asterisks (*) represent sounds which are rare or non - existent in English.

Learn Czech 1 - Greetings

Learn Czech 2 - Asking directions

Learn Czech 3 - Public transportation

Learn Czech 4 - Telephone

Learn Czech 5 - At a restaurant

Learn Czech 6 - Shopping

Learn Czech 7 - At a hotel

Learn Czech 8 - Culture

Learn Czech 9 - Car trouble

Learn Czech 10 - At work

Learn Czech 11 - Car accident

Learn Czech 12 - Dealing with staff

About the Czech Language

The Czech language belongs to the Slavic language group. There are many grammar and vocabulary similarities among the Slavic languages. Czech and Slovak are especially close.

The Czech language was created from the preslavic language, believed to be used by slavic tribes around 2,000 BC through the 7th century AD. Evidence of the Czech language goes back to the 9th century.

Today, Czech is spoken by about ten million people. The Czech language is fairly uniform throughout Bohemia with some local dialects in the border areas. Czech spelling is very phonetic. It is essential to learn the basic sounds and a few pronunciation rules. Once familiar with them, it is easy to read and spell almost any Czech text.

The Czech alphabet, like the English alphabet consists of vowels and consonants. Vowels are either long or short. The basic sound of long vowels are the same as the sounds of short vowels. Long vowels are pronounced for a longer period of time, approximately twice as long as short vowels. Another classification divides vowels into two groups: hard and soft.

The Czech language does not have a vowel reduction like German and English. The quality of a vowel does not vary with its position in a word. Every syllable must be clearly pronounced.

The Czech language has two basic intonations: statement and question. The intonation falls down at the end of a statement but rises at the end of a question.