Ask the linguistic expert.

I have deemed myself a linguistic expert as I speak English like a native of a certain education level; my French is flawless, as twenty secular geese will attest; and I am conversant in Dutch, as long as the conversation is about, “Vijf youngen springen op de tafel.” After that, I get a little confused.

In honor of our upcoming trip to Prague, I have turned my linguistic prowess to the Czech language. Some of you may not be aware, but many experts consider Czech to be the third most difficult language to learn, right after Mandarin Chinese and Estonian. I know little about Chinese or Estonian, but Holy Toledo, if they are harder to learn the Czech, I ain’t going any where near them.

First of all, the Czech are stingy with vowels. Apparently, many, many moons ago when they were creating the Czech language (Čestina, as they say), they were dirt poor and couldn’t afford to buy vowels (damn you, Pat and Vanna), so when it came to words like “krk” and “prst”, they were forced to forgo the luxury of being able to pronounce the words. Then a few years later, they had an evil archduke with a speech impediment. He made this unbelievable sound, like a rolled ‘r’ with a ‘zh’ behind it. He deemed it a letter, “Ř” and got it inserted into a large number of words. Just a bunch more words that can’t be pronounced.

Throw into that mess, nouns are either male, female or neuter and every adjective changes depending on the gender of the noun. It is a friggin’ nightmare. And is ‘neuter’ really a gender?

So far I have learned two words, “Ahoj” and “Prosím”, (“Hello” and “Please”). I’m guessing I won’t be having long, intimate chats with any of my new Czech friends.