Do you need to learn Czech? Maybe you live in the Czech Republic and want to understand what people are saying, or you have a Czech speaking partner. Or maybe you just like the sound! Whatever your reason for learning, you’ll need to learn to understand the fundamental words!Learning Czech can be incredibly overwhelming since the grammar is frighteningly complex. But when you can understand all the words used, it’s much easier (and a lot more fun).
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Buy Now for $29.99At Refold, we're focused on getting you to understand real Czech — the kind spoken in TV shows, YouTube videos, and everyday conversation. The biggest obstacle to that is vocabulary, and that's exactly what this deck is built to fix.
This hand-crafted deck gets you to comprehension quickly by focusing on the words that actually appear in Czech media. We analyzed hundreds of transcripts, subtitle files, blog posts, and books — compiled manually over 2.5 years — to build one of the highest-quality frequency lists for beginner Czech learners anywhere.
Unlike decks for Romance languages, Czech shares very few cognates with English. That means there's almost no free vocabulary to pick up just by looking at a word. So we didn't waste a single card on words you'll figure out on your own. Every word in this deck earns its place.
Czech is also highly inflectional — nearly every word can take dozens of different forms. To handle this, the deck is optimized to expose you to words as they actually appear in context, so your brain starts recognizing their forms naturally. We also included 100 of the most common small grammatical words as bonus vocab, since these are frequent, tricky, and easy to overlook.
When you finish this deck, you'll have the foundation you need to understand about 85% of Czech TV shows and YouTube videos. For best results, combine it with immersion learning — check out our complete immersion learning guide.
Learning Czech vocabulary has never been easier than with the CZ1K Vocabulary Deck.
The hardest part of learning a language is basic comprehension. Once you can understand enough to have fun, you'll never want to stop.
Learn what Czech actually sounds like with high-quality audio recorded by a native Czech speaker.
Reinforce what you learn with concrete, high-quality visuals.
Learn words in context with custom-made example sentences made by an experience Czech teacher.
The deck’s great, it has all the quality you expect from a Refold 1K deck. The audio is clear and the example sentences are good. It doesn’t waste your time, it goes over the most common and basic words so you can start understanding sentences in immersion. It has everything you want and nothing you don’t. I especially liked the Small Words deck, it’s fun going over some small grammatical words and then immediately recognizing them in my immersion afterwards.
Alex
Czech Learner
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You will need to do some study of basic Czech grammar. However, our recommendation is to KEEP IT SIMPLE. Czech is a highly “inflectional” language. That means that (nearly) every word can have dozens of different forms.
Most Czech courses and teachers focus an incredible amount of energy on this. But it’s not necessary! We recommend you start with vocabulary first and some basic grammar. Then, spend a lot of time with Czech, understanding simple content and becoming familiar with the way words change. Then, once you’re in the intermediate stage, you can dive deeper into grammar.
To get started on your journey, Czech out our free Czech resource doc: https://refold.link/czech-beginner-materials
Yep! It just takes time, energy, and effort. The Czech deck took our team of data scientists, high-level Czech learners, and Czech natives about 150 hours to create. We’ve done the hard work so you don’t have to.
If you’re not serious about learning Czech, go ahead.
Duolingo is a language-learning video game. It’s a great way to try out a language to see if you like it and to build a daily habit of engaging with the language.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t get you very far, it only teaches a few hundred words, in awkward, formal sentences and very very slowly. It definitely won’t help you understand real Czech.
Not really! There are some options, but they have a few problems:
If you want to use a free deck, join our Discord server and find the #cs-general channel (the Czech learning channel). Ben has shared some of his Anki cards there, but those are cards that he personally made and weren’t made to be an official deck.
The decks for Czech are super short (maybe a few hundred words).
They aren’t focused on helping you understand TV shows and casual conversation.
They haven’t filtered out the “easy words” or cognates.
They don’t have native audio.
The example sentences (if they even have any) are crowdsourced and usually low quality.
NO! This just builds the initial foundation for understanding Czech. Fluency comes after thousands of hours spent with the language.
Check out our Czech quickstart guide for content recommendations.
Congrats 🥳! Head on over to our guide on sentence mining to learn how to make cards directly from your immersion.
One of the hardest parts about making this deck was sourcing the words. Czech is a difficult language to make a frequency list for, since it’s highly inflectional and there aren’t any good, automatic parsers.
Plus, most written Czech is from official broadcasts, formal sources and books. But written Czech is vastly different from spoken Czech. Any list based off those formal sources would be missing a very important aspect of learning to understand Czech.
So Ben did it all manually. Over the course of 2.5 years, he’s been saving hundreds of transcripts, subtitle files, blog posts and books to analyze and use for this deck.
During his learning, he manually looked up words and lemmatized them to create one of the highest quality (if not THE highest quality) frequency lists for beginner Czech learners. We haven’t seen anything close to this level of quality.
Some of them are, but we decided that wasn’t the highest priority for this deck. The focus was on creating natural sentences. But since the words are so common, once you get past the first few hundred, many of the sentences become 1T (meaning that there’s only 1 new word in the sentence).
