A few months back I shared a list of ten common English mistakes Czechs make. Since then, several fellow expats have reached out with additional suggestions. As a result, I’ve compiled a second list. I hope it’s useful!
Mistake No.1
Czechs say “Thanks God” instead of “Thank God.” For example: “I am not ill anymore, thanks God!” This makes it sound like the person is offering thanks to God (unlikely, considering most Czechs are atheists). It can also come across as sarcastic. A Czech student recently remarked: “It’s stopped raining, thanks God.” His downbeat tone gave the impression he meant: “Oh it’s sunny again. Thanks for nothing God.”
Mistake No.2
Czech people overuse the word “how.” For example, “It’s the way how we write.” This is incorrect because both ‘the way’ and ‘how’ can be replaced with ‘the fashion in which’. But if you repeat this replacement you get: “It is the fashion in which the fashion in which we write.”
Mistake No.3
Among the most common English mistakes is confusing ‘y’ and ‘j’. For example, Czechs pronounce ‘major’ as ‘mayor.’ So you hear sentences like: “We have a mayor problem.” Unless this isn’t an error and mayors really are an issue here?
Mistake No.4
Czechs pronounce ‘v’ as ‘w’. These small pronunciation errors can make English sound like an alien language. For example, “My mayor question is wery important. Will I speak English wery well ewentually?”
Mistake No.5
Czechs use the continuous tense for activities they did repeatedly in the past. For example, “When I lived in New York, I was using the subway every day.” (Correct version: “When I lived in New York, I used the subway every day.”)
Mistake No.6
Czechs confuse the words ‘complex’ and ‘comprehensive,’ so they produce marketing slogans like: “We offer complex solutions to your problems.” Not the most inspiring offer!
Mistake No.7
Czechs forget that ‘we’ includes them too. ‘We’ is already more than one so when you add yourself you get three people at least. A teacher recounted the following anecdote about this error: “A student said to me: “We went to bed with my wife.” I looked at him impressed. “So Honza, you had a threesome?” He spluttered, “No, no, no, we didn’t.”
Mistake No.8
‘Sympatický’ means friendly, so Czechs translate friendly to sympathetic. But in English to be sympathetic means to be consoling, which is why I struggled to keep a straight face when I heard: “The Americans were very sympathetic when I told them I was Czech.”
Mistake No.9
Czechs use “until” instead of “by” when talking about deadlines. For example, “Please make sure it’s printed until the 15th.” This is confusing because it sounds like the document shouldn’t be printed until the 15th.
Mistake No.10
Finally, there’s the Czech classic: “I like spending time in the nature.” There’s usually no article with ‘nature’, ‘society’, ‘space,’ or other abstract nouns. That said, this is one of those English mistakes that’s so ubiquitous I question whether I should correct it because it feels like I’m robbing students of their national character.
*Click here to read the first list of English mistakes Czechs make.