I'm thoroughly enjoying the comments from my posting. (You don't have to be related to me to post them!) My sister Marcy is a linguist, and my brother Rick has studied Czech, so they have some interesting things to say about the Czech language.
I learned that a fun, very basic way to acquaint yourself with a language is to drive on its country's roads and play the Alphabet Game. (This was actually my 9-year-old's idea, and not because of the educational value.) I thought it was funny how instantaneously we found the letters "K" and "Z." The two letters that were nearly impossible were "Q" and "W." Steve and I finally found "Q" simultaneously--me on an Antiques store, and him on the ubiquitous ad for "Urquell" beer. Both are foreign words. As for "W," I found that in a name on a German truck just as I was about to give up.
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English, like German, used to have different noun endings depending on the part of speech -- you can still see the remains of that in "he," "him," "his," etc. Now that we've gotten rid of those endings our word order is stricter. Maybe someday Czech will lose theirs and buy a couple vowels, who knows? Languages change (except for when they're dead, like Latin).
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