This is not your typical tourist phrasebook. It contains over 75 categories of terms in Czech and English with over 4,000 terms, phrases and sample sentences. Also included is a guide to the English and Czech alphabet and pronunciation.
The English / Czech Phrasebook is designed to be used by the English speaker to learn the basics of the Czech language or for a Czech speaker to learn the basics of English.
If you are intending to learn any new language, you'll find a recommendation to get a phrasebook. The purpose of the phrasebook is to give you prior practice in real-life situations. Memorizing phrases ahead of time is the BEST way to use a phrasebook. Your grammar book, and sometimes even your course, does not give you the "Which room is mine?" kind of phrases. Yes, you will need to flip through the book to find responses or the next question on a different topic, but that is only if you do not practice a bit ahead of time. You can't beat this book - for the price and the small, yet concise and relevant content. Learn how to tell time, order food, go through customs, as well as greetings and social conversations.
The lexicon of Czech is closely related to Polish and Slovak and it also has many Russian loanwords. The written Czech language through the use of diacritics and other accent marks gives a very good understanding of how the words should be pronounced, so though you will often see the same word in Slovak and Polish, the latter languages are not written with the pronunciation marks.
Proper names may or may not be translated between languages. Generally country names are translated, but personal names, place names, and trade names (products) are not. Some words may provide an alternate translation or transliteration, others may not.
This phrasebook is derived from our Words R Us system, a derivative of WordNet. English Wordnet, originally created by Princeton University is a lexical database for the English language. It groups words in English into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides brief definitions and usage examples, and records a series of relationships between these sets of synonyms. WordNet can be viewed as both a combination dictionary and thesaurus.
