This long-term private course was an interesting language and cultural experience for me. The student was quite advanced B1/B2 in normal “communicative” usage of Czech. He was able to speak and understand what was needed but he needed to understand “the business Czech” and to be able to undrestand Czech for work and “byroczech”.
Our task was to find all the small but crucial mistakes and bad habits in using Czech and to correct them. It was sometimes not easy to cover all the spectrum neverthless we tried our best to put things into order (phrasal verbs, prefixes, czech aspect-imperfective/perfective verbs, reflexive verbs, cases (in plural), pronouns, word order, prepositions, pronounciation etc.).
The student was eager to really understand “how that all works”, we were finding the same examples in different languages to help him settle the new information into his language system. For me it was a very good practise in finding out the easiest and the most obvious way of explaining the usage of practised grammar or vocabularly. We were also using drill quite often to help the brain “put the information in the right category”.
Language appeared so wide and there were so many things to work on which happens with advanced levels…. We could do just a part but I hope the “process” itself was funny and interesting for both of us. We were using my own materials (texts about politics, culture and sport) and his own materials for work (business mails, projects, analyzes…), “Nebojte se češtiny”, “Chcete ještě lépe mluvit česky”, “Krok za krokem” and “401 Czech verbs” (this time I would also use “Čeština pro B1 Kestřánková a kol.”)
