🇨🇿 Czech for beginners: the best resources

Free on desktop, Android and web; the iOS app is a one-off paid purchase that funds the project. The interface is dated and the options are overwhelming at first, but nothing beats it for retaining vocabulary over years. Most effective when you stop grinding premade decks and start mining sentences from things you actually read or watch.

The state portal for the two exams that actually matter administratively: the A2 Czech exam for permanent residence and the B1 exam for citizenship. It explains who must sit them, the format of the written and oral parts, the roughly thirty annual sittings across 29 schools, and publishes free mock tests, preparation materials and a handbook. Interface available in Czech, English, Ukrainian, Russian, Vietnamese, French and Mongolian. It is exam preparation, not a course — nothing here teaches you Czech from scratch.

Michal records short episodes spoken slowly and in deliberately simple Czech, with the explicit aim of getting beginners used to hearing the language rather than teaching grammar — transcripts for every episode are published alongside. Around 70 episodes and still publishing in August 2026, and it is entirely free. Because it is all in Czech with no English support, the first few episodes are hard going; the payoff is that you are listening to Czech from day one.

Zuzka publishes short, tightly-focused videos on the specific things that trip English speakers up — when téměř is the wrong word for 'almost', how to say 'it's me', numbers for public transport, the 42 letters of the Czech alphabet. Uploads were weekly through August 2026. Explanations are in English with Czech examples, which suits beginners; the format is a set of standalone clips rather than a course, so you will need something sequential underneath it.

Renča publishes short episodes every weekday around a single weekly topic, with each episode building vocabulary toward Friday's longer piece that you should be able to follow if you did the week — a structure that turns listening into a habit rather than a one-off. Over 130 episodes by August 2026 and free in any podcast app. The daily cadence means individual episodes are slight, and the accompanying blog is sparse.

The Czech branch of the Easy Languages format: unscripted conversations filmed on the street in Prague and elsewhere, subtitled in Czech and English so you can see the gap between textbook Czech and what people actually say — including the obecná čeština endings courses tend to hide. The parallel 'Super Easy Czech' series slows everything down for beginners. Free on YouTube and still posting in August 2026, though at a slower cadence than the larger Easy Languages channels.

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Jana Slav's site organises videos, grammar exercises, presentations, podcast episodes and tests by CEFR level all the way to C1, which puts it ahead of almost every other free Czech resource on range. There is a strong strand on the A2 permanent-residence and B1 citizenship exams. The site content is free with a small optional shop; the YouTube channel and podcast have both slowed markedly, with the podcast last updated in 2023, so the site is the living part of the project.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

A long-standing free reference whose strongest section is pronunciation: every Czech sound recorded by a native speaker, including the ř that defeats most learners, alongside grammar basics, themed phrase lists with audio and simple exercises. It remains the quickest way to get the sound system straight before you start speaking. The copyright line stops at 2021 and no new material has appeared since, so treat it as a fixed reference rather than a maintained course.

An EU-supported portal offering a full free course with no time limit and no ads, split into five strands — everyday, medical, business and legal Czech plus a conversational tandem section — with the interface available in Czech, English, German and Polish. The professional strands are unusual and genuinely useful if you work in a Czech hospital or office. The platform is functional rather than polished, and free courseware of this kind tends to stop being updated once the funding round ends, so check the material still matches current usage.

The default place to ask 'is X app worth it' or 'what should I do at B1' and get answers from people who have actually done it, plus per-language subreddits (r/Spanish, r/LearnJapanese, r/French) with far better resource lists. The wiki and FAQ head off most beginner questions. Expect strong ideological camps — comprehensible-input purists versus textbook people — so read a few threads before taking any single answer as settled.

The place to ask why a noun took that ending, whether a phrase sounds natural, or which textbook is worth the money, with Czech speakers answering regularly and useful recurring threads on the residence and citizenship exams. Particularly good for the spoken-versus-written Czech questions that textbooks avoid. It is a small subreddit, so replies can take a day and some questions go unanswered; r/czech is larger but mostly not about learning.

Czech Radio's international service keeps a dedicated section on the Czech language, publishing interviews and features in English about dialects like Brno's hantec, how learners master the ř, expressions and their origins, and Czech taught abroad. It is background and motivation rather than instruction — articles about Czech, not lessons in it — so pair it with an actual course. Everything is free, with audio versions of most pieces, and the section is updated regularly.

Seznam's dictionary is the default bilingual lookup in Czechia, covering Czech against English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Slovak, with audio pronunciation and inflected forms shown for entries. It is quick, free and needs no account, which is what you want for the dozens of lookups a day that early Czech demands. Definitions are terse and it gives little sense of register or collocation, so move to a monolingual dictionary as soon as you can read one.

A channel built around real-life dialogues for beginners — ordering food, shopping, small talk — including hour-long 'listening marathon' compilations that work well as background repetition while commuting or cooking. Posting weekly as of August 2026. The dialogues are scripted and slower than real speech, so treat them as a drill rather than authentic input, and the channel offers no grammar explanation at all.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

Modern assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) will roleplay a scenario at your level, correct your writing with explanations, generate graded reading, and hold voice conversations — endlessly patient and available at 2am, which no tutor is. Free tiers are enough for text practice; voice modes generally need a subscription. The caveats are real: models are noticeably weaker and more error-prone in lower-resource languages, they tend to produce bland textbook register rather than how people actually speak, and they will not correct you unless you explicitly ask them to.

Covers 14 languages along an explicit CEFR path, and its best feature is the community exchange: you submit short writing or speaking exercises and real native speakers correct them, free of charge, in exchange for you correcting theirs. The free tier is limited to core lessons; Premium unlocks grammar, offline and the full path. A solid Babbel alternative if you specifically want writing practice with human feedback.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.

Lída Holá's series — Čeština Start, Čeština expres, Česky krok za krokem and New Czech Step by Step — is what most Czech language schools teach from, with editions annotated in English, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Spanish. Crucially, the audio recordings, online exercises, word banks and teacher manuals are free downloads even if you don't buy the books, and the accompanying YouTube channel posts short graded news videos with subtitles most weeks. The books themselves are paid, and prices are high for what is a fairly traditional course.

Innovative Language's Czech arm: dialogue-based audio and video lessons arranged into level pathways, each with a PDF transcript, line-by-line breakdown and SRS flashcards. Czech has very few structured audio courses, which is what makes this worth considering despite the format. A free lifetime account unlocks a fraction of the library, the rest is subscription-only, and the upgrade prompts are constant. The catalogue thins out badly above B1. The public podcast feed was still updating in August 2026.

The free tier is genuinely usable (ads plus a limited 'hearts' system); Super removes both for about $96/yr. Its real value is streak-driven consistency for absolute beginners, and the smaller courses are thin machine-assisted content rather than the polished Spanish or French trees. Treat it as a warm-up habit, not a curriculum — nobody reaches conversational fluency on Duolingo alone.

Around 6 million words recorded by native speakers across 400+ languages, usually with several accents per word so you can hear regional variation. Free to search on the site; the paid tiers are aimed at API users and bulk audio downloads. Indispensable for names, place names and anything a TTS voice would mangle — many learners wire it directly into Anki for card audio.

Built-in correction tools let partners fix your messages inline, and the social 'moments' feed gets you corrections from strangers without arranging a call. Free for the core exchange; VIP adds more translations and simultaneous target languages. The persistent caveat is that a fair share of users treat it as a dating app, and exchange partners are unreliable — it works best once you already have some output to correct.

Import podcasts, articles or ebooks, tap unknown words for definitions, and LingQ tracks your known-word count over time. The free tier caps how many saved words you can keep, so serious use means paying (~$13/month or less annually). The interface is clunky and the built-in SRS is weaker than Anki, but the reading-plus-audio workflow with 50+ languages is hard to replicate elsewhere.

The 'learn with locals' video clips are the distinguishing feature — you hear real people at real speed rather than TTS. Be aware that Memrise moved user-created community courses off the main app in 2024 onto a separate site, which gutted what many long-time users valued most, and the app has leaned hard into AI chat features since. Fine as a phrase-and-vocabulary app for major languages; if you came for the community decks, use Anki instead.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.

Eliška's team built slowczech around one problem — foreigners who understand Czech on paper but freeze in a shop — so the podcast (close to 300 episodes and still weekly in August 2026) speaks slowly about ordinary life, and the tutoring and immersion programmes push output from the first lesson. There is a free starter kit and the whole podcast archive costs nothing. Self-paced courses, group immersion and one-to-one lessons are paid, and the content stops around B1.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit: you shadow native audio, record your own version, and a real human coach returns feedback — 10 free submissions a month, unlimited for about $20/month, with full scholarships for anyone who needs one. Covers French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and English. It only fixes pronunciation and delivery, so it complements rather than replaces conversation practice.

Same idea as HelloTalk but with vetted profiles and a cleaner focus on actual voice and video calls, which makes it noticeably less spammy in practice. Free to use; Pro adds unlimited partner search and extra languages, and the app also sells paid tutors. Both apps live or die on finding one or two committed partners, so expect to message a lot of people before anything sticks.

Built for Czech schoolchildren, this is a large bank of short adaptive exercises on spelling, case endings, verb forms and vocabulary, including games, dictations and multiplayer races, with a dedicated 'Czech as a second language' section for non-natives. The adaptive engine keeps feeding you what you get wrong, which is exactly what declension practice needs. It is entirely in Czech and pitched at native children, so the framing can feel odd; a lot is free, with personal and school licences unlocking the rest.

Each course is ~100 short bilingual dialogues with native audio: you passively absorb for months, then start an 'active wave' translating back into the target language. Books run around €30 (e-courses ~€50) across 70+ languages, and the method is a long-standing favourite among polyglots for reaching real reading fluency. Caveats: many courses are only published from French, the humour is dated, and it demands daily discipline with no gamification to carry you.

Subscription-only after a handful of free intro lessons, typically $10–15/month with big discounts on annual plans. Lessons are short, dialogue-first and explain grammar properly, which makes it a much more serious beginner course than Duolingo. It covers only 13 languages and effectively stops around B1, so it is a stepping stone rather than a destination.

Over 70 languages, each a step-by-step beginner course written by an experienced teacher, and crucially all the audio is free to download from the companion site even if you find the book secondhand. Slightly more academic and grammar-forward than Teach Yourself, which some learners prefer. Like any book series the individual titles differ in quality; the less common languages are often the only decent course in existence.

You listen to and repeat thousands of native-recorded sentences on a spaced schedule, which builds fluent output patterns without explicit grammar study. It covers 60+ languages and keeps nine minority languages (Catalan, Welsh, Taiwanese, Kurdish and others) permanently free as a preservation effort. It is expensive at roughly $20–40/month, and the repetition is monotonous — most reviewers call it effective but overpriced, so try the 7-day trial first.

One-on-one video lessons from roughly $5–30/hr depending on the language and the teacher's credentials. It is the single fastest way to get real speaking practice, and the reason most self-study plans stall is that they skip this step. Community tutors are cheap conversation partners; professional teachers are worth it if you want structure, homework and error correction.

Lessons build outward from real conversations with colour-coded literal translations and cultural notes, and the catalogue includes endangered and indigenous languages nobody else covers. Retail pricing starts around $10/month, but a very large number of public libraries and universities give patrons free access — check yours before paying. Content depth per language is modest, so it suits travellers and early learners more than people pushing toward B2.

You sit in on a recorded lesson with two students and build sentences aloud alongside them, with no writing, homework or memorisation; 19 languages are available. It is remarkably good at making the core grammar of Romance languages click in a few hours. Vocabulary coverage is small, the recordings are old, and the courses after Michel Thomas's death are taught by other teachers with mixed results — treat it as a fast on-ramp, not a course of study.

Thirty-minute audio lessons force you to produce sentences out loud before you see anything written, which builds unusually good accent and recall. Subscriptions run about $15–21/month (all-access covers 50+ languages), and older courses are often available through public libraries. It is slow and vocabulary-light by design, so pair it with reading — but for commute or walking time it is the best use of otherwise dead hours.

100,000+ tutors across 120+ subjects, with a free replacement if your first tutor is a bad fit. The main structural difference from italki is that Preply pushes weekly lesson subscriptions and takes a large commission from tutors, which some learners consider a reason to prefer italki. Worth comparing side by side for your language — prices, availability and tutor quality differ per market rather than per platform.

Unlike most apps it is built around producing speech: you repeat, roleplay and converse with an AI tutor that gives pronunciation and phrasing feedback in real time. Covers Spanish, French, Korean, Japanese, Italian and Chinese for English speakers, with a 7-day trial then a subscription (roughly $20/month or $99/yr). Good for overcoming the fear of speaking before your first human lesson, but an AI will not push back or drift off-script the way a real conversation partner does.

The 'Complete' books are proper structured courses with dialogues, graded exercises and downloadable audio, and the range covers languages no app touches. Quality varies noticeably by title and author, so check reviews for your specific language before buying rather than trusting the series name. Their graded readers and 'Script Hacking' alphabet guides are also worth knowing about for non-Latin scripts.