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Czech & Slovak Textbooks

By James Naughton:

Colloquial Czech, 3rd edition (Routledge, 2010): The linked page gives details of this popular textbook for beginners (and the standard textbook for the Oxford Czech (with Slovak) degree course).
- Local resources for Colloquial Czech: online vocab exercises, quizzes, etc.
Czech: An Essential Grammar (Routledge, 2005): Details of this concise Czech grammar for learners, including a full table of contents and errata.
Colloquial Slovak (Routledge, 2011): Details of the 2nd edition of this textbook for beginners (with some errata).
Czech Lexicon for Learners: For student use – a preliminary version of a small dictionary of core vocabulary for learners of Czech. Available in several downloadable formats.

Some other useful books for learners of Czech and Slovak are listed below. These books may be out of print, but can often be found on ABE Books or similar websites.

A detailed basic vocabulary aid is: František Čermák, Michal Křen, A Frequency Dictionary of Czech: Core Vocabulary for Learners (Routledge, 2011).
Michael Henry Heim, Contemporary Czech, UCLA Slavic Studies no. 3 (Slavica Publishers, 1983).
Slovak for Slavicists, ed. Peter Baláž et al (Bratislava: SNP, 1985).
Charles Townsend & Eric Komar, Czech Through Russian (Slavica Publishers, 2000).
David Short, Teach Yourself Czech [various editions].
Bruce Davies & Jana Hejduková, 401 Czech Verbs (Bruce Davies; 3rd revd. ed., 2006)
A Grammar of Czech as a Foreign Language (downloadable PDF, 2010), by Karel Tahal.
Online Czech Grammar (downloadable PDF), by Laura A. Janda and Charles E. Townsend.

Czech dictionaries online

Lingea -- Anglicko-český slovník is perhaps the most reliable and detailed two-way dictionary for learners of all levels that is freely available online. It can often detect headwords correctly when searching from the inflected forms. It will also find words when you type them without their diacritics. Definitely worth closer inspection if you haven't come across it before.

The following dictionaries are not intended for beginners, but they are invaluable for students working on older or more demanding Czech literary texts:

Slovník spisovného jazyka českého
Příruční slovník jazyka českého (1935-1957)
Vokabulář webový (for earlier Czech; includes Gebauer's Slovník staročeský, Elektronický slovník staré češtiny, Staročeský slovník, and others)

Slovak dictionaries online

Lingea - Slovensko-český slovník
slovník.sk (with diacritics)
Elektronický lexikón slovenského jazyka
Slovenské slovníky (Krátky slovník slovenského jazyka, Slovník slovenského jazyka; dictionaries of synonyms, historical dictionaries, etc.)
Note also: Slovak National Corpus (requires registration)

Miscellaneous Language Resources

Please note that some of the websites below have not been updated in many years, although some of the content may still be of some use.

Internetová jazyková příručka, a grammatical dictionary, giving declension and conjugation forms of words etc. (Produced by Ústav pro jazyk český and highly recommended.)

Some online vocabulary testing material for Oxford Prelims is available on WebLearn.

Měsíce? dny? - learn the Czech names of the months and days of the week (local webpage).

Czech word order – a detailed article (in Czech) by Aleš Svoboda (Slovo a slovesnost 45 (1984), no. 1, p. 22-34).

Čeština 2.0: continually updated website of contemporary Czech slang, regionalisms, etc.

Slovo a slovesnost, 1935-present: Časopis pro otázky teorie a kultury jazyka založený Pražským lingvistickým kroužkem

Naše řeč, 1917-present: Recenzovaný odborný časopis věnovaný češtině jako mateřskému jazyku.

Český národní korpus - Hledat v korpusu, search for words in contexts extracted from a large database. See the Ústav Českého národního korpusu home page for more details.

University of Iowa Czech Language and Culture Resources website

Sample exercises from The Case Book for Czech, by Laura A. Janda and Steven J. Clancy.

Owen's Little Czech Primer, picture vocabulary for beginners and children

SlovoDne.cz, Czech word of the day (in Czech).

Slovník - Help for English, picture vocabulary for learners, in Czech and English

Brown University On-Line Czech Anthology - this site is an annotated anthology of selected texts by Karel Čapek and several other authors. It currently provides 22 texts, accompanied by QuickTime audio files in Czech and other tools for reading. [Last updated: early 2000s?]

The Czech Language on WWW, contributions by Czech linguists on features of the language, including its phonetics and non-standard spoken forms, along with a number of rather more lightweight and "fun" items, such as palindromes and tongue-twisters. [Last updated: 2001]