Czech Adjective & Pronoun Endings
Welcome to another day of learning Czech! Today we're going to look at basics of gender and word endings (again)...because it's a never-ending topic in Czech.
After this article, you will finally understand how to say properly:
Excessive, awful, appalling housing prices in Prague are unbearable for an average person.
Practice what you learn in this article for free:
Table of Contents
Adjectives Match NounsBack to top
The Czech language loves to make words match. If a noun is masculine, then its adjective, pronoun, number, etc. all have to dress to match. If it's feminine or neuter, same thing - every word in the sentence related to that specific noun puts on an ending to match the noun's gender.
Let's look at our first example:
Excessive, awful, appalling housing prices in Prague are unbearable for an average person.
Přehnané, hrozné, otřesné ceny bydlení v Praze jsou neúnosné pro běžného člověka.
The matching cases and genders of the adjectives and nouns are important here. That's how we know that the prices are awful and a person is average.
In this example we have some nouns, which are ceny (plural of cena) and člověka (accusative of člověk because it's behind preposition "pro").
The adjectives for ceny are: přehnané, hrozné, otřesné, neúnosné.
And for člověka (in nominative form): obyčejný, normální, běžný.
Well, this is starting to get confusing...we've got nominative, accusative, adjectives, nouns...
The important thing here is to look at the adjectives and how the last few letters change. The adjectives for one noun follow one pattern, and the adjectives for the other follow another pattern.
Unfortunately, just like every other foreigner to arrive in Czechia, you have to learn these endings.
There are patterns.
There are so, so many patterns...
And yes, it gets messier in plural and with cases, but this is the backbone: match the ending to the noun's gender.
Start small when learning these endings!
Practice singular, then add plural and then each case on its own.
You can try it with our case practice tool here.
Or read our articles about Czech cases here
(You'll find adjective ending tables at the end of each article).
Demonstrative Pronouns in CzechBack to top
Demonstrative pronouns are words that "point" at things.
In English you have: the (definite article), or a (indefinite article) and you have to use them everywhere.
In Czech definite and indefinite articles (the and a) are optional, so you only really use them to add emphasis, ie. they act like a demonstrative pronoun
(and there is no "a" in Czech, there is only "the", ten/ta/to).
There are also other demonstrative pronouns: this, that, these, those, his, hers, ours, etc.
And of course in Czech, every one of these can change its endings according to case and gender!
So much fun, I know you are enjoying this :D Let's look at some examples:
Let's look at some examples:
Ta druhá polévka byla vynikající.
That second soup was excellent.
Ta druhá (feminine) because polévka is feminine
Ten druhý burger byl moc, z toho množství jídla se mi dělalo špatně.
That second burger was a lot, from that amount of food I felt bad/sick.
Ten druhý (masculine) because burger is masculine inanimate
...and on a side note, numbers also change according to our nouns.
Czech is not trying to confuse you...it's just highly coordinated. Once you learn to spot a noun's gender, the rest is just about matching endings.
And they all really sound very distinctive, once you get used to the pattern you won't be confused which words are referencing each other.
So remember:
- That beer - To pivo
- That dog - Ten pes
- That cat - Ta kočka
And off you go to practice your Czech :)