🇨🇿 The best websites for learning Czech

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.

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.

Maintained by the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences, this is the authority Czechs themselves consult. Search any word to get its complete declension or conjugation table, and the accompanying articles settle spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and word-formation questions. For a language whose difficulty is concentrated in case endings, having the full paradigm one search away is the highest-value free tool there is. Everything is in Czech, and the explanatory articles assume you already read Czech comfortably.

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.

Lingea's free Czech-language portal bundles a monolingual dictionary, a dictionary of synonyms and the spelling and punctuation rules, so you can check what a word means, find a less repetitive alternative and confirm how to write it without leaving the site. A good companion to the Academy's příručka, which is stronger on paradigms but weaker on meaning. It is entirely in Czech, so it becomes useful somewhere around B1, and Lingea advertises its commercial dictionaries throughout.

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.

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.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

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.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

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.

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.