Dick Bosman

Expat living in the Czech Republic

What are some unspoken rules in the Czech Republic?

by Leave a Comment

In general:

  • No small talk in shops. There are other people waiting and the cashier doesn’t care about you unless you’ve known each other for years.
  • No small talk in general, particularly in public transport. Same reason. Although there are exceptions of course.
  • Do not smile at strangers. It’s disturbing. Smiling at a stranger is only okay if you hold a door for someone or something similar like that.
  • Do not use first names with strangers unless it is explicitly stated you can do so. No first names in proffesional setting unless stated otherwise. If a person older or of higher position than you calls you by your first name, it doesn’t mean you can do the same to them.
  • Take your shoes off inside.
  • Do not talk about your religious beliefs. Most of the population is not religious and will not care about that kind of conversation (obviously unless both of you decide to talk about it. Just read the room.)
  • Do not mix your beer.

For students:

  • Academic titles matter, do not adress anyone “professor” unless they have that title before their name.
  • Do not ask for an extension without a good reason. It is not a normal thing here and will not be appreaciated.
  • Do not under any circumstances adress your teachers by their first name.

Do most Czechs don’t consider Czechia as part of the Western World?

by Leave a Comment

The majority of Czechs consider Czechia a part of Central Europe with close relation to the Western world. They call their country with poetic hyperbole a“heart of Europe” and they have a substantial reason for it because Czech lands were always in strategic geographic position in Europe and therefore (unfortunately) a subject of interest and interference of powers with tragical consequences for the Czech nation. Czechs do not like to be included in Eastern Europe, which is the relict of communist times separation behind the iron curtain from the view of western countries. I can say, many expats from western countries living here in Czechia feel it some bridge between Western and Eastern Europe.

ČR and illegal immigrants

by Leave a Comment

  1. Eastern Europe is poorer than western.
  2. We don’t have enough money for retired people, for mothers, for single mothers, for disabled, for treating chronic ill, for foster care.
  3. Europe have long and bitter history with Muslims. We have always fought them in order to survive. They were cruel-even for medieval norm.
  4. We did realized, Islamic immigrants brings many problems. They truly aren’t tolerant as everybody wants us to believe.
  5. We aren’t feeling to be responsible for current crize. We spoke against “humanitary bombing” and destabilization of not-democratic, but working regimes. Even ordinary people here were aware these actions will hand these countries ower to terrorists and Europe will be swarmed by refugees we aren’t able to deal with, because Europe’s economy isn’t in good condition.
  6. We don’t know why to take care for illegal immigrants.They are breaking law! They are criminals.
  7. EU failed to protect its borders.
  8. Czechs dislike EU. Our country joined it despite citizens didn’t want to. EU is endangering our independence and self-sufficiency. When our agriculture produce more milk than is allowed it must be disposed of. More corn than allowed-it must be burned… Traditional Czech products had to be re-named because somebody who even don’t know our language said, their names are misleading. Low quality, cheep food is imported in to Czech what does great damage to our agriculture. Besides, good quality stuff is now hard to get. The country of provenience also.
  9. The ones who have all the power in EU are German, France and England. Smaller, poorer countries are just their dust bins and servants who are supposed to dance as they whistle. Refugees are the last thing we need here. We are barely able to keep ourselves above the surface.

What country do Czechs admire most?

by Leave a Comment

If you asked more specifically about the Czechs’ “most favorite foreign nations”, there have been lots of surveys, such as this CVVM survey in 2017: Češi mají stále nejradši Slováky. Jak si vedou ostatní země? – Info.cz

Slovakia won (and almost universally wins, they’re our brothers so it’s just a proxy to loving ourselves – and Czechia wins if it is allowed to compete) ahead of Austria (which is always at the medal spots) and France. I think that most other surveys place countries like Denmark and Switzerland higher than France. Many other medium-sized Central and Western European countries end up near the top. For some time, Germany is no longer near the very top, for numerous reasons starting with their asylum policies.

So Germany ends up in the better half, like the U.S. and e.g. Poland – which we unfortunately love less than Poles love us. Russia along with Ukraine, Israel etc. are in the lower part of the middle, despite our being one of the greatest allies of Israel. And after places like India, China, Latin America etc., the bottom is generally occupied by Islamic nations, with countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq, Syria near the rock bottom. (Well, for our being great allies of Israel, it’s probably enough that we love Israel much more than we love Palestine which is perhaps unusual in Europe! Just to be sure, the answers are surely non-uniform, Israel’s mediocre score is an average of some great Czech Israel fans and Czech anti-Semites, among others.)

This criterion isn’t quite the same as “admiration”. We don’t quite “admire” Slovaks. But that’s one problem. If someone is worthy admiration, many Czechs tend to be jealous. So I think that Czechs prefer and like nations that they don’t have to admire too much. 😉

If you could get results about pure admiration with jealousy removed, I think that some usual successful countries would win, the U.S., Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Japan etc.

How does the Czech language sound to foreigners?

by Leave a Comment

I think it sounds nice, and kind of sexy, all slippy and slidy, with just a bit of nasalized vowels (í) . Lot’s of šs and slchts and čs. I disagree that it sounds like German or Russian…perhaps somewhere in between.

It sort of depends on dialect; the Prague dialect is kind of sing-songy, yet to me sounds kind of “foreign” as I don’t live in Prague. the “ej” endings of adjectives, as opposed to ý endings out where I live, sounds really weird to me, like how I imagine a Texan sounding to a Londoner or something. Even though geographically the reality is quite the opposite.

Out here, the accent is more throaty and less nasalized, but also less varied pitchwise.

The intonation can be pretty monotonous, something which is turned up to ten when a Czech speaks English. I know: my wife is Czech and sometimes I just marvel at how long she can go on talking without varying pitch or tone at all. English speakers usually only do that when we are trying to sound like robots, though I’ve known a couple English speakers who spoke like that. I was a teacher so I have a pretty good speaking voice and for some reason I’m hypersensitive to this kind of thing.

But you don’t notice it so much when you are hearing Czech, it sounds more natural then.

Why is “Czechia” spelled with “cz”, when the “cz” letter combination is Polish and doesn’t appear in Czech?

by Leave a Comment

It is NOT Polish. The digraph “cz” comes from the old Czech orthography, which was taken over by Latin and from Latin by English (Czech, Czechia) to express pronunciation of /t͡ʃ/ (IPA key). In Czech “cz” was used until the beginning of 19th century, since the standardization of modern orthography has been substituted by the consonant “č” (however it was introduced already at the break of 14th and 15th century), usually denoting the voiceless postalveolar affricate consonant [t͡ʃ] like the English “ch” in the word chocolate. In Polish the “cz” digraph is still used, therefore, that etymological mistake about Polish origin survives.

P.S. It is necessary to mention that English Wikipedia wrongly says (and rejects correction /!!/), that “cz” in English came from Polish at the end of 18th century (without any source), which is a nonsense, because in Latin “cz” is documented already in 16th century (e.g. “Czechia” from 1569 in the Latin preface to the “Musica” of Jan Blahoslav) and this digraph in various forms (adjectives, nationality, name of the country) is very frequent in Latin texts in Baroque period. In addition, the first recorded use of a similar (however not correct) name is in English in the word “Czechians” by Peter Heylyn in 1625 in his “Mikrokosmos: A little description of the great world. Augmented and reuised.” (the second edition) on page 298, explicitly referencing Czech sources, including Jan Dubravius: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eeb…. This clearly shows that the word “Czech” does not come from Polish in the 19th century, which is a myth.