Strč prst skrz krk

Not all those who wander are lost in translation, but I find myself doing exactly that lately. In these past days I often catch myself traveling around in public while mumbling and whispering the dozens of easy-to-understand-but-difficult-to-pronounce words I’ve learned during 4.5 hours per day in my first week of intensive Czech language immersion at Charles University in Prague. Five more weeks to go! It’s super-challenging, but actually quite fun. It gives one a real sense of accomplishment at the end of each day, and boy, the naps afterwards are powerful!

A bit of background is warranted for readers who don’t know about this course. 2024 was a year full of “Dear Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me, I’m strong enough now. Thanks.” So in early 2025 I decided to try to create as many interesting opportunities and adventures as possible. Yes, taking risks is inherently risky by definition, and sure, life’s what happens to you while you’re making other plans. But sometimes you can set things in motion to your favor. I want to do that from now on! No more long-term planning, but instead just setting a course and seeing what happens, making adjustments along the way. I want to have too many interesting stories to ever be able to share them all, and I want no regrets for things I decided not to do so as to take the “easy” or “acceptable” route. One aspect of all this, among others, were decisions to get a long-term visa in Czechia and to take a 6-week intensive Czech language course. So I’m in Prague off and on for much of the next year, mixed in with months in Asheville for family and friends time, and I’m finally learning this challenging Slavic language once and for all, dammit.

And what grand decisions these have been! Several days in after moving to an apartment in Prague, and I’m having such a wonderful and memorable time, I have to keep mentally pinching myself. As my mother lovingly informed me recently, “You are a weird dude.” She’s right! In fact, I’m having so much fun in this language immersion course that I’m already entertaining what the next country and language will be. French, German, Spanish? Maybe eventually, but how about Hindi first?! That seems practical for me. I work with many Indians, I love Indian people, culture, food, music, dance, etc. Then I could also finally understand the lyrics to all the Bollywood songs I listen to (perhaps just to learn that they’re as mundane, trite, and shallow as almost every other popular song). I chatted with someone this week during one of Prague’s group social runs who recently returned from a visit to India, and he completely fell for the place, and he wants to go back. So perhaps Hindi would be useful for a deeply adventurous journey, like around the country of India?!

For now though, I’m happily in Prague, and I get to hang out with my daughter often! And I’m having a great, albeit sweat-inducing, time in the very fast-paced and intense Czech course. This class is not for the faint of heart, let me assure you. It’s no A-B Tech Spanish course once per week, haha. I’m very glad that I studied for two months this year beforehand and that I’ve been in Prague for over 7 months in the past handful of years, such that I had a decent grasp of pronunciation and many basic words and phrases. I believe I’d be really struggling if I hadn’t. This, despite the course being meant for beginners, such as one of my Ukrainian classmates who arrived in Czechia for the first time just two weeks ago! Though to be fair, as I’ll provide more detail on later, Ukrainian is related to Czech, so the four Ukrainians and the two Russian speakers in my class are finding a lot of Slavic lingual overlap, making their learning simpler than I and my German-speaking friends are finding it (not to mention the Chinese guy!!).

The title of this post is “strč prst skrz krk” – perhaps the sounds one makes when choking on a big piece of poorly-chewed Czech pork knuckle. I include it here because it’s a great example of the lack of vowels as we English speakers know them. In Czech, an ‘r’ can be considered to be a vowel, which makes some sense when you think about it. This particular phrase, if you’re interested, means “stick your finger through your neck”. Perhaps not that practical of a phrase, but a consideration when it’s 1:15pm and you haven’t eaten lunch yet, but you’ve been speaking and listening to a fairly inscrutable foreign language since 9am, and the teacher is still running us through drills…

While I learned Swedish and Spanish well enough to eventually have conversations, this is my first language immersion course, and I believe that it’s clearly the way to go. The instructors say only a few sentences in English per several hours. Otherwise it’s all in Czech. They go out of their way to figure out how to describe things in Czech, and sometimes they just pull up photos to show us. It’s interesting how I don’t find myself using English as an intermediate step very often in Czech. Through repetition and lack of English use, many of the meanings get integrated without needing the English in between. You just get it – the words generate the associated meaning in your head without needing English to figure it out. No mapping necessary. I’ve never learned a language this way before, and it clearly seems best. I recall being frustrated about how much English the instructor and students spoke in a “level 4” conversational Spanish class at A-B Tech in Asheville. None of that here, despite it being a level 0 course. And besides, some of the Ukrainians don’t seem to know English well anyway.

Speaking of that, it’s been engaging to have so many nationalities represented in the class of nine students (including me). The German guy and the Swiss guy are often pronouncing the ‘s’ with a ‘z’ sound, and the Ukrainians and the Russian speakers (neither is from Russia – one is from Israel, and the other is from Belarus) are finding many similarities in Czech, but to the point that they use the Russian or Ukrainian instead, which sometimes isn’t quite right or means something different. One gain I hoped to get from this course was to be able to understand and read the other Slavic languages to some extent, and this clearly will be true given how much overlap between Slavic languages there seems to be. I’m the only American, and there is one Chinese guy. There are four Ukrainians total, and one must assume that they were displaced, but I haven’t been brave enough to ask yet.

Here’s another bonus Czech word without a vowel: “cvrnkl”. Or how about the musician coming soon to perform in Prague: Petr Vlk – two names, one vowel. But of course, one quickly gets used to this, as it’s the way it is. The letter ‘r’ and the letter ‘l’ are basically vowel/consonant combos anyway, and when one learns how to pronounce them, it eventually doesn’t seem noteworthy anymore.

That said, I’m finding some Czech words particularly difficult to pronounce well, even after repeated attempts and lots of practice, like “tři” (three) and “čtyři” (four). Czech has a letter and associated sound combo, the dreaded ‘Ř’, which is tricky to issue from one’s mouth correctly.

As opposed to English, which is a mostly analytic language, Czech is a so-called synthetic language, where meaning is combined into single words. So, for example, “I do not understand” in English is just “nerozumím” in Czech. Further, even proper names change based on context, such as when stating someone’s name when addressing them directly. So my name gets an ‘e’ at the end when the teacher calls on me to answer one of her many questions, as in Scotte. Surprisingly, female names ending in -a get changed to end in -o instead, like Anna becomes Anno (which confusingly sounds just like “ano,” which means “yes” in Czech), and Viktoria becomes Viktorio.

So in Czech, when someone says my name when speaking to me, they say what sounds like SKOAT-AY. If referring to me in the third person, it’s just SKOAT. A Ukrainian guy asked me the other day whether he should call me SKAAT (which is how I pronounce it) or SKOAT, like the word “coat”, with the long O. I had never considered that before, so I said either is fine.

Already I’ve found the learning to be effective, such as when a cafe or restaurant staff member calls out my order number in Czech. And on a recent walk in a park, I found myself actually catching little snippets of Czech here and there, sometimes even understanding entire sentences that little kids were saying. I’m just a big kid myself now, with a much more limited vocabulary and grammar than those toddlers. I have at times been practicing some newly-learned Czech in transactions, but I usually must revert to English given my small set of memorized words.

As the weeks progress I aim to try to put the new knowledge to use more often, and I’m sure there will be funny anecdotes that result, similar to last summer when something I said wrong in Czech made cafe staff at Sofia’s hospital laugh for several minutes! I never figured out what it was.

In that vein, let me reprise some unintentionally funny Google translations from Czech-language Google Maps cafe reviews from a post from November 2021:

• “Big thumb up behind smiling attendant.”
• “Service – always cats…”
• “Male tables. Cute.”
• “Those who do not have much advice, have nothing to give.”
• “For 70-80Kč I will get a drowning” … “If drowning was the first thing I would have ordered you, it would certainly be my first and last visit in my life.”

It’s sort of a shame, but Google’s translations appear to have really improved since then to the point that it’s now difficult to find many strange translations like these on Google Maps.

Future posts on this blog will provide updates on the language learning. If only I were as good as Google’s software.

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And now, back without any demand:

Today’s dad joke:

Earlier this week Prague hosted the Czech Rabbit Jumping Championships! Apparently some of the trainers for these animals are quite accomplished, and not just with pet jumping, but in other areas of life as well. And I heard that some of these trainers have septets of bunnies, making these pets the 7 rabbits of highly effective people!

(This joke only makes sense if you know of Stephen R. Covey’s works, sorry)

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Today’s music video:

Despite not having had any Hindi language lessons yet, one can pick up some commonly-used words and phrases from listening to Bollywood music. For example, I recently learned the word “thumka”. Because I heard it mentioned so often in various songs, I looked it up. It’s slang for “hip thrust” – there’s a lot of hip thrusting in Bollywood dancing, for sure, so a dedicated word seems justified!

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Today’s Epictetus:

Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.