Masculine is the 2nd skill (assuming read left to right) of the Czech language tree. It has a total of 4 lessons which introduce you to the masculine grammatical gender.
Grammar Notes[]
Grammatical Gender[]
Czech nouns have grammatical genders which may or may not accord with the actual biological gender. There are four grammatical genders:
- Masculine animate: e.g. muž (man)
- Masculine inanimate: e.g. dům (house)
- Feminine: e.g. věc (thing)
- neuter: e.g. děvče (one of several words for girl)
For masculine nouns, there are some patterns but always exceptions.
- Nouns ending in a consonant are mostly masculine. kluk (boy), muž (man), stroj (machine), hrad (castle), dům (house).
- But many common nouns ending in a consonant are feminine, e.g., věc (thing), sůl (salt), kost (bone), postel (bed).
- Nouns ending in vowels are commonly feminine or neuter but there are exceptions which are masculine:
- _a nouns are commonly feminine but e.g. táta (dad), kolega (colleague), turista (tourist), and terorista (terrorist) are masculine.
- _e nouns are commonly feminine but e,g, soudce (judge) is masculine.
- _i nouns are commonly neuter but e.g. vrchní (waiter) is masculine.
Adjectives[]
Adjectives have to agree with the gender and number of the noun they modify. There are two types of adjectives in Czech, hard and soft. They differ in their endings:
- In the singular nominative form hard adjectives end with -ý when modifying masculine nouns e.g., mladý muž (young man) or velký strom (big tree).
- In the singular nominative form soft adjective end with -i regardless of gender e.g. další muž (another man), poslední dům (the last house).
Demonstratives[]
Czech doesn't have articles. Where the distinction is important, "a" or "the" is decided by context, word order or other methods. Czech does, however, have some demonstratives. These also agree with the noun. Hence ten is a demonstrative for masculine nouns e.g., ten muž (the man, that man)
Lessons[]
Lesson 1[]
- ten strom = the tree
- kluk = boy
- člověk = person/human/man
- velký = large/big
- malý = small/little
Lesson 2[]
- muž = man
- starý = old
- stroj = machine
- mladý = young
- jiný = different, other, else
Lesson 3[]
- hrad = castle
- dům = house
- nový = new/recent
- špatný = wrong/bad
- ten = the/that
Lesson 4[]
- zvláštní = strange/weird/curious
- poslední = last/final
- další = another/additional/next
- František = František (male name)
- Matěj = Matěj (male name)
References[]