Lesson 8 – Simple sentences, ZSD

Dear students,

     this is the moment you've been waiting for. We'll learn... HOW TO COMPOSE A SENTENCE. YIPPEE!
     OK, it's probably not such an achievement but let's be modest and, eventually, you might be surprised.

     So, Czech and English sentence structures do not fatally differ, at least not in their gists. We start with subject followed by a verb and then we place an object into the sentence. Here ends the simple part.

Let me itroduce you the structure of a Czech sentence:

BOOM! Don't worry, I know there's too much information in that picture. I'll explain it all. But, at first, I'm going to answer the question you've been asking from the very beginning of this article, which is: What is ZSD?

ZSD

Základní stavební dvojice consists of two words– the subject and the verb (subject-verb agreement). Why is it so important? When little children learn to write sentences, they write what they hear and mostly it's correct. However, "y" and "i" are read the same way in Czech and it's hard for them to find out which one they should use, especially in verbs, because they have no "permanent" form. Let me explain– the noun "myš" even if inflected (myši, myší) is always written with "y" after the letter "m" and the suffixes for each case never differs neither. Now, the verb zpívat (= to sing; conjugated here) is written with "í" after "p" but when conjugated– in past tense and plural– there are three different endings: -ali, -aly, -ala.

Which one should you use?

The suffix -ali is used when the subject is in plural and it's masculine. And, similarly to French, it can be masculine and feminine (when it's multiple subject or when you refer to feminine and masculine subjects as "they" "=oni").

We use -aly when the subject is plural and feminine.

And -ala if it's plural and neuter.

The subject has to correspond with the verb no matter what. These are the deciding aspects: number (plural or singular), person (first, second, or third), tense (present, past, or future), mood (indicative, imperative, optative, interrogatory, or, conditional), gender (masculine, feminine, or, neuter), and aspect (perfective and imperfective).

I'm not going to bother you with all of these. You only need to learn to distiguish the number, person, tense, and gender.

This is a lot of information so let me simplify and clarify. This is our model sentence:

Pes si hraje s malou kostí.

The subject is "pes" which is a masculine and singular noun. The verb is "si hraje"; now look into the conjugation table of the verb hrát si and find the appropriate form– si hraje. Found it? If so, you already know that the person is third (on/ona/ono) and because the verb in this person doesn't change depending on the gender of the subject, you don't have to worry about the gender (even though it's obvious); and the tense is present. Together, subject and verb, create ZSD.
As to the rest of the sentence, I don't want to scare the hell out of you but the adjective malou is also inflected because in Czech we inflect them along with the noun they precede/follow. Fortunately, there are only two paradigms for adjectives:  mladý and jarní. The adjective malý (mentioned above in the model sentence, inflected) is inflected according to the paradigm mladý. I'll dedicate another lesson to the nouns of this sentence. 

love & peace
Ciray