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- "Je to hoch?"
14 Comments
For those wondering about the use of kluk, chlapec, and hoch, I would say "kluk" is the most widely used and should be your go-to word when saying boy.
Chlapec is rarely used in everyday conversation, would probably only hear it if an older person is speaking very formally or more frequently you would see it in a news article or on the news where they tend to speak in more formal/proper Czech. (So more of a word for you to recognize than use)
Hoch, I've personally never heard said as a word for boy, but only specifically in the phrase "Hele hochu,..." as in "Look here boy/Hey boy", but in that use it doesn't necessarily mean boy, as it's used that way by older men to any man significantly younger than them. (My great uncle uses it when speaking to me, I'm almost 30)
This post made me laugh quit a bit as i loved that your uncle calls you like that. Thank you for the explination.
I am not Czech but I heard the word "hoch" about two months ago when a young guy called his friends and told them to tidy something up so it was like "Hoší, uklidněte tady". And only thanks to DouLingo I understood him, because I had not been aware of its existance in Czech.
"Chlopak" is not a Czech word. Sounds Polish. There is a Czech word similar to 'chlopak' and it is 'chlapík' which means 'a guy' ' a chap' and I am not entirely sure if it is considered street Czech or proper. In any case it is an adult person. You might have meant "chlapec". There is no difference between hoch and chlapec
Is there any reason to have so many different words for the same thing so early in the course? Kluk, chlapec, and hoch are all very different words and serve the same purpose, as you say. It seems very confusing as part of these tasks, when the focus should be more on the grammar...
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In almost three years of living in Prague, I have never heard or read "hoch". Za skoro tři roky že bydlím v Prahy, nikdy jsem neslyšel "hoch".
I am originally from Prague and I never uttered "hoch". Just not what you say in Prague. But try southern Moravia... These are quite regional. They might say the same about "kluk".
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People have told me the regional dialects in this country are pretty strong. So now a know a little of one. The course is great, by the way!
The Czech national corpus of the contemporary written Czech has more than 70 thousand sentences with "hoch" in various forms. If we require exact singular nominative "hoch", we still have 15 thousand sentences.
As a Czech native speaker, "kluk" is the most widely used. Chlapec can be used here or there, more when speaking formally. Even though interestingly enough, "chlap" is more often used than "muž", for example: "Byl tam chlap..." = there was a man...
For boy, there's kluk, hoch, and chlapec, and for girl, there's holka, dívka, and děvče. Do these pair together in such a way that using one word for girl implies using a particular one for boy over the others, and vice versa?
