Teach Yourself Czech: A Complete Course for Beginners

by Michael Jenkins

A beginning course to learn Czech on your own.

Genres: Czech Literature, Nonfiction, Reference

346 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Michael Jenkins has spent most of his career in the British Diplomatic Service and has served in Paris, Moscow, the Hague, Bonn, Washington, and Brussels, where he was for a time Deputy Secretary-General of the European Commission.

While at the Embassy in Moscow, Jenkins wrote his first book "Arakcheev, Grand Vizier of the Russian Empire," a biography of one of the ministers of Alexander I. He was knighted in 1990.

Educated privately and at King's College, Cambridge, Jenkins spent much of his youth in France. He is married and has a son and a daughter.

Reviews

[Andrew]

Teach Yourself is the best guide out there for learning another language. There may be better guides, but you can bet they're more expensive. There are also severely over-rated guides like Pimsluer, who will as promised teach you to converse in another language quick and easy, so long as your idea of learning a language means using eight cds to learn four paragraphs worth of dialogue.

The Czech course is one of the better courses T.Y. has put out. You'll learn the basics very fast and should you finish the whole course, you'll be quite well off on your way to speaking Czech.

[M.B. Dallocchio]

While it had quite a few decent lists of phrases and decent pronunciation in the audio, I felt that the content wasn't sufficient in teaching functional, everyday Czech. Luckily, while I was in Prague, I had a tutor who helped fill in the linguistic gaps. This is a good primer for those looking to start studying Czech, but not sufficient in getting around with the basics.

[Caitlin]

Teach Yourself Czech (Teach Yourself Complete Courses) by David Short (2005)