Czech Alphabet

Discussion in 'Grammar & Pronunciation' started by Anonymous, Dec 9, 1999.

  1. Anonymous

    Anonymous Guest

    Thank you to who replied to my previous post. I have a some questions, however. How is the Czech alphabet pronounced? Are the characters with accent marks considered seperate letters? Also, is there a way to type those characters? (as in an "alt + number" type code). I appreciate any reply.
    -LB
     
  2. Anonymous

    Anonymous Guest

    I should have re-worded a part of my question. What I want to know is how the individual letters are pronounced. Just like the letter "a" is pronounced differently in English than it is in Spanish. Ive had not luck in researching that. Also, ive been taping and watching Czech news (televizni noviny). Is there any benifit to this if you really dont understand 95% of it? Can it increase my vocabulary? I have found it to familiarize myself with the basic words and especially numbers better.
     
  3. Dana

    Dana Well-Known Member

    Lenny, Local Lingo has an audio pronunciation guide for all Czech characters, including those with accent marks at www.locallingo.com/czech/pronunciation/. We have recently posted audio pronunciation of the Czech alphabet. Just like in English, memorizing the way individual characters are pronounced is not all you need to learn when studying Czech. As you probably know, it is important to learn how characters are pronounced within whole words, in interaction with other characters - our pronunciation guide should also be somewhat helpful there.
    I don't think I'll be wrong if I say that the characters with accent marks are considered variations of the "basic" characters (those with no accent marks). E.g. the long "a" is a variation of the short "a", the "c" with the little v-shaped mark above it is a variation of the regular "c". These characters do act as separate characters, they affect the actual or grammatical meaning of a word and are not interchangeable with the "regular" characters.
     

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