"He sees a big castle and a big bear."

Translation: On vidí velký hrad a velkého medvěda.

[JamesDrotl1]

As someone who is not a native Czech speaker, I feel that I should explain here that both "hrad" and "medvěd" are masculine nouns, but that the reason that the adjectives modifying them are different in the accusative case ("velký" as opposed to "velkého") is due to a distinction between what is animate and what is inanimate. Velkého describes medvěda because bears are living things. Castles are inanimate, so they just use velký. I lived for a year in Olomouc when I was 19, and I remember this being a challenging aspect of an already difficult language.

[Randonneur3]

I love it that our keen course designers use a limited vocabulary of nouns, adjectives and verbs while letting us see the ins and outs of inflections as logical and based on models. Gripe: some 3rd party dictionaries don't include a noun's gender.

[MargiePett2]

Thank you very much. A great explanation.

[J.C.M.H.]

Yes, and this difference between animate and inanimate nouns exists in all Slavic languages that have preserved the declension of the cases, and in all of them the accusative singular of masculine animate matches the genitive singular of masculine and neuter.

[AgnusOinas]

Yes, that's the trick for masculine nouns. In masc. animate, accusative = genitive. In masc. inanimate, accusative = nominative.

It only works like this for nouns ending in a consonant, which is the vast majority of masculine nouns.

[Kayti967472]

Thank you - that's a really helpful explanation!

[EstaJohnst1]

on vidi = he sees, but earlier I put "Ja vidim" - "I see" and it was pronounced wrong.Why????
(Sorry I cannot put accents here.)

[VladaFu]

Comment at the sentence where that happened and report the complete answer. And please use your questionmarks sparingly.

[DJLimole]

Why is medveda used instead of medved?

[BoneheadBass]

The bear is a direct object in this sentence. Medvěd is nominative; medvěda is accusative. Declension table available here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/medv%C4%9Bd

[Ragnar435681]

The hover text says velky medveda but the correct answer is velkeho

[AgnusOinas]

The hint (hover text) for "big" says velký, velká, velké, velcí, velkého, velkých, etc. and the hint for "bear" says medvěd, medvěda, medvědem... Czech words have multiple forms, you have to learn to be able to use the correct one. ;)

[valyo8]

I am Bulgarian I find Czech easy with the vocabulary, but as Bulgarian is the only analytic (using determine article but lacking cases) Slavic language, the cases are a killer to me, even though I know some Russian...

[AgnusOinas]

So you count Macedonian as a dialect of Bulgarian?

It may comfort you that conjugation is less complex in Czech than in Bulgarian - we have only kept a single past tense (with its two aspects, of course).