"last person"

Translation: poslední člověk

[va-diim]

I'm having trouble understanding hard vs. soft adjectives. No other language I've encountered has this. What determines whether it's hard or soft?

Why not posledna osoba?

[kacenka9]

As a quick and dirty trick, if the adjective ends in í in masculine, it is soft. Nominativ, singular.

[va-diim]

Thank you for the trick to recognize it, but when and why would you use it as opposed to a hard adjective?

[BoneheadBass]

You probably know this by now, but for new users who might be wondering...

You don't really choose to use a hard or soft adjective.. When you learn a new adjective, you also learn whether it is hard or soft. When you use a particular adjective in a sentence, you use the correct endings for that adjective, depending on whether it follows the hard pattern or the soft pattern. More information is available at this handy site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_declension#Adjective.

[KJSkinner]

That is a good trick im going to reccomend it to some freinds

[ValaCZE]

Posledná osoba is slovak ;)

[SJihqV]

Is there a reason it cant be the oposit word order? Člověk posledni?

[BoneheadBass]

An agreeing adjective -- one that must match the noun it modifies in gender, number, and case -- generally appears in front of the noun. If this were a question, though, I believe that "Je ten člověk poslední?" ("Is that person [the] last?" would be fine. (If I'm wrong about that, one of the Czech natives on the team will let us know!}