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Rating: 
Summary: Best all around czech
Review: Best all around czech book if you are interested in learning. The text is very easy to follow and learn, but the accompanying cassettes are difficult. They are okay to hear conversation but they are hard to follow because the people on the tape speak very quickly, so i end up having to stop and rewind repeatedly.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent value for your money
Review: I bought this book, with cassettes, before going to study in the Czech Republic last summer. Though I made it through only the first few lessons, I was surprised by how much I could still understand. Czech is a very complex language in terms of syntax, with each noun having seven cases, for example. This book, I believe, introduced this concept, and most grammar, very well. However, Czech is also a very difficult langauge to learn how to speak, thanks to a unique letter "r hacek" which is found only in czech, and typical slavic consonant clusters (some words don't even have vowels!). Unfortunately the tapes were rather sparse. While all the dialogs were read, often times there were no accompanying exercises. For example, there was rarely the opportunity to repeat after the speakers on the tape, or to take a role in the dialogs. Nonetheless, listening to the tapes regularly did allow me to impress a few Czech students and professors with my "excellent pronunciation." And for less than $..., its an excellent value, especially for someone on a limited budget. If you would like to learn the Czech language, for not a lot of money, I would definitely recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent value for your money
Review: I bought this book, with cassettes, before going to study in the Czech Republic last summer. Though I made it through only the first few lessons, I was surprised by how much I could still understand. Czech is a very complex language in terms of syntax, with each noun having seven cases, for example. This book, I believe, introduced this concept, and most grammar, very well. However, Czech is also a very difficult langauge to learn how to speak, thanks to a unique letter "r hacek" which is found only in czech, and typical slavic consonant clusters (some words don't even have vowels!). Unfortunately the tapes were rather sparse. While all the dialogs were read, often times there were no accompanying exercises. For example, there was rarely the opportunity to repeat after the speakers on the tape, or to take a role in the dialogs. Nonetheless, listening to the tapes regularly did allow me to impress a few Czech students and professors with my "excellent pronunciation." And for less than $..., its an excellent value, especially for someone on a limited budget. If you would like to learn the Czech language, for not a lot of money, I would definitely recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Muddled
Review: I found some of the sections okay. As stated by the previous reviewer the speakers spoke too fast. Some of the sections too advanced for the beginnerBut it was muddled and unclear as to the grammar. These should have been pulled out more and explained more clearly. I got to chapter 5 and am now looking for a book that breaks the grammar down for someone like me!
Rating: 
Summary: Important Western Slavic language
Review: I got this book (no cassettes or CDs came with mine) for a half-semester course I took on Czech history and culture; those of us who wanted stayed behind after class with our professor to learn some Czech. He didn't assign any book for those of us who were interested in the optional language part, but this was the only book on Czech I could find at the off-campus textbook store. As a native speaker, the professor thought it was really good. Of course it doesn't have the most comprehensive dictionary in the back, but that's to be expected with any teach yourself language book. You have to go out and get a real Czech-English dictionary if you're inspired enough to keep learning.
Czech isn't an easy language, but I found it easier than many would, already being familiar with the Russian language. Czech is a Western Slavic tongue and Russian is Eastern, but they're maybe about 75% similar, with some regional changes (for example, many words starting in G in Russian are exactly or nearly the same in Czech, only they start in H, such as hrad/grad [castle]). And even though the accent marks over the consonants can give some people a hard time at first, at least Czech is written in the Roman alphabet. And as the professor told me, it's 98-99% similar to Slovakian, my paternal grandpap's native language, so learning Czech meant I could talk to him and understand most of what he said. Since it's so hard to find a good dictionary or instructional volume on the Slovakian language, this book on Czech is a real bargain.
Rating: 
Summary: Average. Difficult to use as a reference book.
Review: I'm quite disappointed with this book. The layout is disorienting and the index, well the index doesn't point you to page numbers. That doesn't bode well for looking up specific topics. There's a complete lack of refernce tables. I was hoping for something more visually organized. If you're the type who doesn't need to have information in it's place and are ok with taking the lessons as they're thrown at you, then you'll enjoy this book more than I have.
Rating:
Summary: Good for student, but not for real beginner
Review: My boyfriend is Czech, and his mother was coming down to visit us, so I thought it would be a wonderful idea to learn the language before she got here. I bought this book in order to aide me in that mission. It didn't work. I was more confused than anything, and my boyfriend said most of that language was wrong. There are too many dialects of Czech in the small country to compose it within one book. He's Moravian and he would help me speak Czech, but he couldn't do it from the book when he explained to me what the words really meant. Czech isnt easy to learn anyway, but this book wasn't as helpful as I thought it would be.
Rating:
Summary: A highly recommendable Czech course!
Review: This Czech-course is the best I've ever read, and I've read quite a few! It is, as he title suggests, based on conversations in which you find interesting and easy understandable czech expressions and sentences. Every lesson has a very good grammatical section, and you'll find (almost) every word in the book explained in the czech-english, english-czech dictionary. The language you learn in Colloquial Czech is the "high czech" (spisovná cestina) used in national television and radio. However, most czechs speak dialect and this may of course be a major obstacle for the autodidact student. Colloquial Czech deals with this problem exellently dedicating the last lesson to spoken, colloquial czech (obecná cestina), thereby enabeling the student to understand czech as spoken in the suburbian pubs of Prague. The one thing that might irritate the student is the laziness and indolence of the caracters. Lines as "get out of bed!" "borrow me som money!" are symptomatic of the coversational subjects. The conversations are situated in a young student milieu basically dealing with love and beer drinking. Someone might find this boring and influencing on ones own effort; I liked it though! I now study czech at the University of Oslo. I could not have done this without the help of Colloquial Czech. All my fellow students have used it too, and I know that they all share my opinion: This czech course is highly recommendable!
Rating:
Summary: Great course
Review: This is a great way to get started learning Czech. Naughton's book is absolutely replete with grammar, which most books like this are seriously short on. The book isn't clogged up with tons of ridiculous situational dialogues (like "My polka-dotted Zimbabwean friend and I escape the monkey-pox by chugging four Pilsners daily.") The author grades vocabulary according to the level of difficulty that each lessons presents. The book includes loads of Czech sentences with English translations right next to them so you don't have to waste time scurrying to your dictionary. Neatly arranged diagrams make learning verb conjugations and stuff like that easier. Exercises give you a chance to practice what you've learned. Also, the book is low-key and efficient. No huge diagrams, no massive space-wasting color pictures, no silly "show me the way to the pub" exercises. In the back of the book you'll find a nifty little section called "More Words and Phrases", which includes some specialized and tourist-oriented vocabulary arranged according to subject matter (e.g., finding your way, clothes, eating, letter writing...) This way you don't have to wade through a bunch of words like "gooseberry" in the middle of a grammar lesson. There's also a dictionary in the back and a handy reference section which lays out all the grammar rules in concise form. Excellent book. Five stars.
Rating:
Summary: Great course
Review: This is a great way to get started learning Czech. Naughton's book is absolutely replete with grammar, which most books like this are seriously short on. The book isn't clogged up with tons of ridiculous situational dialogues (like "My polka-dotted Zimbabwean friend and I escape the monkey-pox by chugging four Pilsners daily.") The author grades vocabulary according to the level of difficulty that each lessons presents. The book includes loads of Czech sentences with English translations right next to them so you don't have to waste time scurrying to your dictionary. Neatly arranged diagrams make learning verb conjugations and stuff like that easier. Exercises give you a chance to practice what you've learned. Also, the book is low-key and efficient. No huge diagrams, no massive space-wasting color pictures, no silly "show me the way to the pub" exercises. In the back of the book you'll find a nifty little section called "More Words and Phrases", which includes some specialized and tourist-oriented vocabulary arranged according to subject matter (e.g., finding your way, clothes, eating, letter writing...) This way you don't have to wade through a bunch of words like "gooseberry" in the middle of a grammar lesson. There's also a dictionary in the back and a handy reference section which lays out all the grammar rules in concise form. Excellent book. Five stars.
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