Learning Czech: The Struggle Continues in Week 5

Where does the time go?! After five weeks, I’m almost at the halfway point in my Czech learning journey! As my (self-inflicted) deadline draws closer, the lessons are getting harder and harder. Just as I was getting the hang of verbs, Duolingo threw me a curveball: grammatical cases.

Anyone who has ever studied a case language will understand my struggle. Personally, I have little experience with cases, apart from a short spell of German on Duolingo almost ten years ago. But while German has four cases, Czech has seven!

Regardless of how the cases actually work, even wrapping my brain around their names seems like a victory: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental. Up until a few days ago, I was working solely with the nominative case, but out of nowhere, the accusative has appeared in my learning path.

This increased difficulty is slowing down my progress, so I’m going to have to make some changes to pick up the pace. I think the highlighters will be making a reappearance for some colour-coded declension charts!