More fun with Czech [#projectPrague blog post]
I have now, apparently, surpassed A1 level. Which is good, but it's taken 5 years of on-and-off studying. My 5th anniversary here was at the end of April. I am finding this hard to believe.
But I am still grappling with the language.
I have a very vague hope that It is possible that my Czech will have substantially improved before it's time to take my daughter to kindergarten, or pædiatrician, or anything. But not very likely, I fear. Czech is savagely difficult and my improvement is glacial.
4 genders, invisible diacritics, invisible letters that aren't written but you must pronounce (which I personally think is worse than English's silent letters), consonants that are sometimes vowels, vowels that are written differently and have different meanings but sound identical (again, IMHO worse than English's 5 symbols for 20 vowel sounds). 7 cases, and a complex system of prepositions to go with them. Only 3 pure tenses (but then English only has 2, plus in the region of 120 (!) modal auxiliaries and moods/modes) but a complex system of "long" and "short", "perfective" and "imperfective" forms and combinations thereof, depending on when it's happening, whether it's instant or over a period, whether it ends at the time being spoken about or continues through it, whether you do it regularly or not, etc.
Anyway. After 5y, I've now moved past ordering a beer and can just about get past using the human-staffed lines in the supermarket as opposed to self-service tills. I can buy a train ticket and order a meal, but if they ask me how it was, it goes pear-shaped very fast.
At 20 I picked up basic German in 3 days of hard work, by way of comparison.
"Just copy the patterns" is what my native friends keep urging me, but they (patterns not friends) are fractal in their complexity. (Well, friends too, I suppose.) Adults native speakers have no idea whatsoever how it all works, they just copy it instinctively.
This is perfectly normal. Native speakers never do. Example: what's the difference between "him" and "he"? Why?
When you make a 2nd order conditional, what tenses do the 2 verbs take, as opposed to a first order conditional? How about 3rd order?
I bet nobody here knows. I didn't before my TEFL course, and I was a professional editor.
Examples in case it helps:
1st order: "If it rains, I'll get wet."
2nd order: "It I won the lottery, I'd buy a Peraves Monotracer."
3rd order: "If I'd studied music as a kid, I'd have played in a band as a teenager."
One thing that is particularly confusing to me is that the patterns in Czech are reused a lot.
For example, masculine nouns end in a consonant.
(It is of course not as simple as that. Masculine animate nouns mostly end in "hard" consonants, masculine inanimate nouns end in "soft" consonants, and there are neutral consonants which can be either.)
Feminine nouns end in a vowel, often "a".
So, um, "muž" is a man, but "žena" is a woman.
But only in nominative case.
To mark a masculine animate noun as accusative, that is the object of a (subset of) verb(s), (maybe, it depends), which is mandatory by the way, you add an "a" onto the end.
So "David invites Martin" (meaning, for a drink), would be "David zve Martina".
[EDIT: yes, as a demo of the trickiness, I got it wrong. "Zvu" is 1st person: "I invite". 3rd person is "zve". *Sigh* Not intentional, and thanks for the corrections. Yes, plural.]
Poor Martin (male name) just got a sex change and is now Martina (female name).
"David invites Martina" would be "David zve Martinu". The feminine noun takes a different ending in accusative, natch.
So you have to be able to do basic grammatical analysis on the sentence to know that the name Martin has undergone declension (and of course which declension, as there are 7 for all 4 genders, a basic 28 forms, but they're usually different for plurals, and there are 2 plurals, one for 2-4 and one for 5+.)
Otherwise, if you don't know that, well, I would assume Martina was a woman, because it's a woman's name.
The patterns overlap. Some declensions take endings _off_ the words, of course, because otherwise it'd be too easy and no fun*. (*I presume this is why they did it**.) (**Yes I am kidding.)
1 car: auto (nominative neuter)
2 cars: auta (nominative plural, not feminine)
5 cars: aut (high plural, i.e. neuter genitive)
And some nouns do change gender when in plural.
Also, uniquely in my experience, verbs and adverbs take gender. Sometimes. Forget that and you give extreme offence when just asking someone a simple question.
I knew Hebrew did this but I didn't know the Indo-European family of languages did.
Recreationally learning Czech feels a bit like recreationally hammering nails into your head.
But I can't just stop, because I live here, I like it here, and I want to be able to speak to my partner in her own language, and maybe appreciate some Czech classics of literature in their original form.
Like Kafka. Oh hang on, he wrote in German. "Metamorphosis" is a mistranslation: it doesn't say Sansa became an insect at all.
Er. The Good Soldier Švejk, then.
As a no more than indifferent hobby linguist, I used to think I knew a bit and had some modest skill in that area, until I came here. I then discovered that some of the way-out stuff I'd heard of -- Mandarin, Vietnamese or Thai tones:
http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2015/11/tone-deaf.html
http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2016/05/tonal-trickiness.html
... Cantonese's swallowed vowels, or Quechua's evidentiality ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality ) -- that's big-picture stuff.
But the Slavic languages... sheesh. They're our near-neighbours, culturally and linguistically they're siblings. And then they throw gendered verbs at you?
http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2015/05/identity-confusion.html
I mean I regularly call my girlfriend a man.
Czech doesn't have a verb that means "to like". It has to love, but to say you like something, you say:
Mám rad pivo.
(I) gladly have beer, or (I) have beer gladly.
The verb encodes the identity of the person so they discard the pronoun, like Spanish.
But adverbs take a gender. I can't do conditionals yet, so I don't know how to say "would you like a cup of tea?", but if I said to Jana, "like a cup of tea?"
Más rad čaj?
That sentence encodes 2 pitfalls. "Máš" is the intimate form and I would be offensive if I said "Máte rad čaj?" because that also means "(you) like tea?" but it is the formal form for someone you don't know
very well.
But both also say "like a tea, Mr Clearly Male Man?"
To a woman I must say "máte rada čaj?" or "maš rada čaj?"
I'd never met anything like that before, from French to Japanese, and I regularly forget.
This is after easy beginner stuff like the tons of "accents" they put on consonants. I only knew how to handle accents on vowels: fiancée, naïve, etc. The French cedilla in Français and garçon honestly doesn't seem to make any consistent difference.
But Czech has š for sh, č for ch and so on, plus ť for ty, ď for dy, ň for ny -- but they usually don't bother to write those because you must always say ty if the t is followed by i, for example. (Except when you don't, such as foreign words.)
We western Europeans take so very much for granted, and even other white, broadly Christian Europeans have profoundly different languages to us. And if Sapir and Whorf are right, then that means a very different world-view.
Which has made me re-assess so many things. How the different languages like the many African and both North and South American work, and what it's like to see the world through them. What it's like to have to live and work and learn in Spanish or English, languages which lack even simple basic stuff like stating how true you judge something to be.