Is Czech Hard To Learn? (Helpful Content!)

Czech is generally considered to be a relatively difficult language to learn. It is a fairly complex language capable of great expressive depth, and it has difficult grammar and pronunciation. It is very different to English, so as an English speaker you’ll have an uphill battle getting to grips with it—but you are certainly capable!

Learning languages is always a difficult task, and this is even truer of Czech than many other languages.

Nonetheless, learning it is an immensely rewarding challenge that you’ll benefit from in countless different ways, and so the reward is well worth the effort of learning it.

Let’s find out more.

How difficult is learning Czech?

As an English speaker, learning Czech is certainly not going to be easy.

It’s a language that is very different from English and so you’re going to be more or less starting from the ground up without a great deal of advantage from your native tongue.

It’s also important to remember that learning any foreign language, however closely related to your own it may be, is never easy—it’s always a challenge.

When it comes to Czech, the challenge is naturally ramped up considerably and you’ll have a hard time learning it at least at first.

One helpful metric for getting an idea of how much trouble you’ll have learning a language is the language family it belongs to relative to your own.

Both English and Czech are Indo-European languages, but this doesn’t mean much—this contains all but a handful of the languages spoken in Europe as well as many languages spoken in India and Asia.

English is a Germanic language, most closely related to languages like German or Dutch.

Czech is a Slavic language, meaning that the Indo-European connection is where the relationship ends.

The two languages are only distantly related, then, and so Czech is going to feel very alien to an English speaker.

Even with this in mind, many languages that are more closely related, like German, are still very difficult to learn.

In any case, you’ve got a long struggle on your hands that’s going to take time. You’ll need to be fully committed to practicing every day and going over the difficult grammar and pronunciation constantly to master it.

With all this said, learning Czech may be difficult but it is well within your grasp.

Many have done it before you, and learning languages is something all of us can do with the right attitude—but how long will it take?

How long does it take to learn Czech?

It’s going to vary slightly from person to person, and there are essentially going to be two parts to learning Czech as with any language.

The first stage is going to be the initial period of study.

The FSI categorizes and ranks languages based on how difficult they are, and thus how long they will take, for an English speaker to learn.

Category five languages are the hardest to learn. Like many Slavic and Baltic languages,

Czech is in category four, meaning it is among the most difficult languages for an English speaker to learn.

Category four languages usually involve an initial study period of about 44 weeks.

This is far from the end of the story, though. Even then, 44 weeks is still a very long time to study any one thing, so you realize how far you are going to have to commit yourself to this task.

Once your initial study is over, you should be at the point where you can reasonably conduct yourself in the language on a day-to-day basis.

But if you are aiming for full fluency, ideally you would then spend an extended period living among the language and using it every day.

Estimates vary for this, but usually within around 3-5 years you will have achieved something approaching full fluency.

There are no shortcuts, then.

Learning a language will take you a very long time, and it will be difficult along the way.

What exactly makes Czech so difficult?

What makes Czech so hard to learn?

There are many aspects of Czech that make it difficult to learn.

It has especially complex grammar, having four grammatical genders, and this alone can be more than enough to trip English speakers up constantly during their studies.

It also has remarkably difficult pronunciation for English speakers, and learning this can take a long time.

In other words, more or less every aspect of learning Czech is difficult.

Is Czech the most difficult language to learn?

Czech is not the most difficult language to learn, although as we’ve seen it’s certainly up there.

Being category four, in the simplest terms there are only a handful of languages that are more difficult to learn than Czech, and these are the hardest languages like Mandarin and Japanese.

Again, though, the rewards and the benefits of learning Czech are more than proportionate to the effort you put in, so don’t be discouraged—it’s good to do things that are hard!

So, while you’re going to have a long period of study and struggle ahead of you, nothing worth doing is ever easy.

Your commitment to learning the language will reflect how easily you get to grips with it, and you’ll find yourself getting better and better quicker than you might realize.

In any case, whatever level of acquisition you are looking for, the rewards are more than proportionate to the effort you’ll put into learning Czech.