I’ve been trying to learn Czech for several years now, and it’s proving brutal. At this point, I’ve spent enough time with the language that I should be able to hold a basic conversation without breaking into a cold sweat. Instead, Czech continues to resist me in ways that feel both personal and deeply unfair.

It’s easy enough to memorise useless phrases that surface at random moments, but retaining anything I actually need seems impossible. A friend once joked that I was nechutně bohatý, disgustingly rich. I replied, nejsem nechutně bohatý (“I’m not disgustingly rich”), and for reasons still unclear to me, that exchange embedded itself permanently in my brain. Years of study later, however, I still occasionally forget how to ask for a restaurant menu.

When I first moved to the Czech Republic, I noticed that many expats never learned the language. At the time, I assumed this came down to laziness. Determined not to fall into that category, I bought textbooks, enrolled in classes, and committed to daily study sessions. Armed with the comforting belief that “half of success is showing up,” I stuck to my routine, confident that persistence would eventually pay off. Several years later, I still find myself asking the same question: how long does it actually take to learn Czech?

Czech has a reputation for being difficult, but I hadn’t expected it to be quite this punishing. In many languages, once you learn a sentence structure, you can reuse it and gradually build fluency. Czech offers no such mercy. Declensions and conjugations are so intricate that producing a grammatically correct sentence often feels less like skill and more like luck. Every time I ask my Czech teacher about an odd sentence, the answer introduces another grammar rule, followed by another three months of study. Then there’s pronunciation. In English, elocution lessons are reserved for people with speech impediments. In Czech, they feel practically mandatory. Some words seem to have been designed as endurance tests, featuring long strings of consonants and an almost total absence of vowels.

That difficulty doesn’t stay theoretical for long. It shows up the moment you try to use the language outside the classroom.

Just recently, a waitress asked what I wanted to drink and my mind went completely blank. Not just the word for green tea, but every Czech word I’d ever learned. After a long pause, I asked for zeleninový čaj, vegetable tea, instead of zelený čaj, green tea. So that was cool and not embarrassing at all.

It still wasn’t as bad as the time I asked an elderly Czech woman for directions to the badminton court and said, “Co je badminton?” (“What is badminton?”). She stared at me as if she were deciding whether I was being philosophical or whether something was genuinely wrong with me.

I tell myself I’m cheering people up. That waitress is probably not going to forget the foreign idiot who asked for vegetable tea. But putting a positive spin on it never really works. I don’t want to be the clownish foreigner whose main contribution to Czech society is accidental comedy. Sometimes I want to say, “I know I sound like an idiot in Czech, but I’m relatively intelligent in my own language.” I’ve even learned how to say this in Czech: “Jsem vlastně docela inteligentní, když mluvím anglicky.” Unfortunately, my pronunciation is so strange that Czechs don’t believe me.

Those moments would be easier to laugh off if they stayed personal. The problem is how other people respond to them.

Many Czechs switch to English the moment they hear a foreign accent. I understand the impulse. They are being helpful. Still, it’s hard not to hear an unspoken message beneath it, namely that your Czech is not good enough. It’s demoralising to spend an hour speaking Czech with a teacher, only to order a drink in a café and have the waitress reply in fluent English. Occasionally, people will switch languages even when we are already mid-conversation in Czech and understanding each other perfectly.

Another peculiar obstacle is selective incomprehension. I’ve seen it repeatedly. A foreigner orders in Czech and is met with a blank stare or a shrug. Even Czech friends get annoyed, insisting there’s nothing wrong with the pronunciation. It’s as if some people simply refuse to engage. For learners of English, the experience abroad is usually the opposite. People tend to make an effort to understand, even when the grammar is poor. That generosity creates a positive feedback loop. Learning Czech, by contrast, often requires rebuilding your motivation after each mildly discouraging interaction.

There are, however, two groups who will reliably speak Czech with you. The first is elderly men at beer festivals, many of whom don’t speak English and are delighted to chat. The second is homeless people. Just last week, I spent ten minutes discussing English football with a homeless man. It was such an enjoyable conversation that I briefly considered starting a social enterprise where homeless people teach Czech to foreigners.

For all the frustration it involves, there are things I genuinely like about learning Czech. One unexpected benefit is that it has made me a better language learner overall. After failing miserably at French in school, I recently picked up a French text and was shocked to understand about sixty percent of it. Czech has been like trying to crack the Da Vinci Code. By comparison, French now feels like a children’s puzzle.

Learning Czech has also taught me where my responsibility ends. If my goal is to have a five-minute conversation in Czech, success is only partially within my control. The other person might be in a hurry, want to practise their English, or simply not feel like talking. But if I sign up to give a short speech in Czech, that outcome is entirely in my hands. Recognising this distinction has been valuable not just for language learning, but for life more generally.

And despite everything, I am making progress. Recently, I managed to rent a parking space using only Czech. It wasn’t elegant and it certainly wasn’t grammatically perfect, but it worked. For reasons I still don’t fully understand, that small interaction felt more significant than any textbook milestone.

If a newcomer asked me how long it takes to learn Czech, I wouldn’t offer a number. I’d ask what they’re prepared to tolerate: confusion, embarrassment, and the slow erosion of their sense of competence. Learning Czech isn’t a steady climb toward fluency. It’s a long sequence of minor humiliations punctuated by brief moments of triumph.

I’m no longer trying to master the language. At this point, I’m just trying to stay in the conversation, to keep showing up, sounding foolish, and occasionally being understood. Some days that feels like progress. Other days, I ask for vegetable tea.