Category Archives: Czech

New Year, New event!

The Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages is delighted to announce a brand new event for the 2023/24 academic year – a Beginners’ Languages Taster Day!

Alongside our usual Modern Languages Open Day (which will take place on Saturday 11th May), this year we will be running an event dedicated to our beginners’ languages courses. This new event offers students from UK secondary schools in Year 12 or equivalent an opportunity to gain greater insight into our beginners’ languages degree programmes at Oxford. Students in Year 11 who are starting to consider their options for university are also welcome to attend.

The Taster Day will take place on Saturday 2nd March in our main Faculty teaching spaces – the Taylor Institution Library and 47 Wellington Square. After an information and Q&A session in the morning, students will have the chance to attend taster sessions in two of our beginners’ languages.

Photo taken from our Modern Languages Open Day 2022
photo (c) John Cairns

The following languages will be represented at the Taster Day, with academics and current undergraduates present to provide further information about the course(s) and to answer students’ questions:

  • German
  • Portuguese
  • Italian
  • Russian
  • Czech (with Slovak)
  • Modern Greek
  • Polish

The provisional event programme can be found here.

To register for the Taster Day, students should fill out this form by 10am on Friday 23rd February so we know who to expect at the event. Please note that spaces will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis, and the form will close once our maximum capacity has been reached.

We are also pleased to be able to help students who are in need of additional financial support with reasonable expenses such as travelling to and from Oxford for the event. There is a space to include this information in the registration form.

Photo taken from our Modern Languages Open Day 2022
photo (c) John Cairns

Our beginners’ languages courses offer an exciting and rare opportunity for students to engage with a new language and culture for the first time, or to pick up languages they studied at GCSE. The courses are challenging yet rewarding, with many designed to bring students up to A-level standard within the first year. Therefore, we would love to welcome students who are strong linguists and/or who are looking for a new challenge at University to this event.

As well as alongside a post-A-level language, most of our beginners’ languages can be studied in conjunction with subjects from the Humanities such as English, History, Linguistics, or Philosophy, for which applicants do not need to be studying a language to A-level or equivalent. With this in mind, we would also welcome students of Humanities subjects who are interested in picking up a language at University.

For further inspiration and information, below are some links to content from our tutors and undergraduates about why taking a language from scratch is so worthwhile:

  • Blog post Why study Czech?
  • Video – Branching Out: Picking up a language from scratch
  • Video – Studying German for Beginners at Oxford:

We look forward to seeing you on 2nd March!

Russian & Slavonic Languages Open Day

Bookings for our Russian & Slavonic Languages Open Day are now open!

This year, our Russian & Slavonic Languages Open Day will be held on Saturday 4th March, 10.15am-12.30pm at University College, Oxford.

Like our other language-specific open days, this event is smaller and more focused in its scope compared to our wider open day later in the year, allowing more time to explore a subject.

Our Russian & Slavonic Languages Open Day is designed to provide greater insight into our undergraduate degree programmes in Russian and other Slavonic languages such as Czech, Polish and Ukrainian. These languages are all available to study at beginners’ level here at Oxford, so the open day presents a great opportunity to find out more about these options and what the courses entail. It’s also a lovely excuse to come and visit an Oxford college and the city for the day, meet our current students and academics, and experience a taste of student life.

Event programme for the 2023 Russian & Slavonic Open Day

If you are interested in coming along to this event, you can reserve your place on our open days webpage. Please note that bookings are mandatory for this open day and that the deadline for registering is 20th February 2023.

As a reminder, we’re running several language-specific open days over the next six weeks… take a look at the table below for further details and sign up to attend here!

*This open day has been designed to be accessible for students considering beginners’ German. From this year’s admissions cycle, applicants can mix Joint Schools subjects with beginners’ German, so please do encourage students considering degrees in English, History, Philosophy etc. to come along and try out some German!

We look forward to meeting you at these events soon!

Why Study Czech?

In this week’s blog post, recent graduate in Spanish & Czech from St Peter’s College, Joe Kearney, reflects on his decision to study Czech at Oxford and where the journey has taken him…

I chose to study Czech at Oxford because I wanted to try something completely different. At school I had studied French and Spanish, and I wanted to learn a language from a totally new language family.

Exploring Štramberk, Joe Kearney

The first year of Czech was certainly the challenge I’d been looking for. I sat in my first language class of the year, in front of the Czech lady (Vanda, she is lovely) who had been tasked with teaching me and my three classmates Czech from scratch, and wondering how I was ever going to learn what any of this stuff meant. The learning curve was steep, but incredibly rewarding. We started with the absolute basics: how the alphabet works, how to introduce yourself, how to order food in a restaurant. By the end of my first year I’d read my first short stories in Czech and I’d been to Prague and worked for a couple of months as a waiter in a pizza parlour! Learning a language from scratch is fantastic for anyone who fancies a bit of adventure.

We spent second year developing our speaking, listening, writing and translating skills, as well as reading more and more literature in Czech. Because Czech is a small course, with just a handful of undergraduate students every year, the course is really flexible. 20th century Czech history and literature fascinated me, and I was able to shape all of the rest of my degree around it. I learned about the interwar period in the First Czechoslovak Republic, the Czech experience under communism, and the Czech journey out of communism in the 90s and 2000s. Writers like Jiří Weil, Ludvík Vaculík and Bianca Bellová captured my imagination, and I was able to take my newfound interests with me on my year abroad, where I studied New Wave Czech film, a history of Czech photography, and modern Czech politics at the University of Ostrava.

View over the aptly named Smrk mountain, Joe Kearney
Skiing in the Slovak High Tatras, Joe Kearney

In Ostrava I got a job as a waiter in a tearoom (the best language training anyone could get!), I went climbing in the hills with my Ostravák friends, and I travelled with a great group of Erasmus students. One of the best things about the Czech Republic, we quickly found, is that it is a fantastic basecamp from which to travel all around Europe. I visited France, Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Poland, and even Sweden that year, as well as making use of the ridiculously cheap trains to get all around the Czech Republic. Some highlights were České Švýcarsko (Czech Switzerland), Skiing in the Slovakian High Tatras, and visiting Kraków, in Poland, and Stockholm, in Sweden. 

My love for Czech grew immensely on my year abroad, and final year went by in a blast. More learning, and more opportunities to take the voyage of discovery further and further.

I would highly recommend learning a new language from scratch at Oxford. My Czech degree was a fantastic awakening to a new world of culture, travel, and wonderful people. I have never looked back!

View over the Beskydy mountains, Joe Kearney

A huge thanks to Joe for sharing his wonderful experiences of studying beginners’ Czech as well as the stunning photos taken on his year abroad in Ostrava last year (2021-22).

If you’re interested in following a similar path, you can find out more about Czech at Oxford here.

Modern Languages Teachers’ Conference 2021: All Welcome!

SRTS Teachers' Conference, offline version
The SRTS Teachers’ Conference, pre-pandemic version

We’re delighted to announce that our Oxford University Modern Languages Teachers’ Network, the Sir Robert Taylor Society, is holding its annual conference this year on Thursday 23 and Friday 24 September. If you’re UK modern languages teacher, or have an interest in modern languages teaching at school and university in the UK, you’re warmly invited to attend. Due to Covid, the conference will once again be online this year, with two evenings of roundtable talks and guest speakers.

On Thursday 23 September, from 19:30-21:00 on Microsoft Teams, the theme will be Modern Languages and Careers.

We’ll be talking about, among other things:

  • Career paths of modern languages graduates
  • Employability and demand for modern language skills in the workplace
  • Transferable skills from modern language study
  • STEM pressure and the value of humanities subjects

On Friday 24 September, again from 19:30-21:00, the theme will be Modern Languages and Diversity.

We’ll be talking about, among other things:

  • Revisiting the canon: diversifying and decolonizing the curriculum in language, literature and film
  • Race, gender and sexuality as topics of study in language, literature and film courses
  • Racism, homophobia and other prejudice in literary texts and film
  • Diversity in the student body: widening participation in modern language courses

If you’d like to attend either or both events, please email us at schools.liaison@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk, and we’ll send you the link to join.

During the events, participation from delegates through the chat and live discussion will be warmly welcome. If you’d like a seat at the Round Table to talk more substantially about either of these topics in secondary or higher education, please let us know, and we’ll be very pleased to accommodate you.

Studying Russian and other Slavonic Languages: New Videos

Recently we held an online open day for potential applicants interested in studying Russian and other Slavonic languages here at the University of Oxford. If you were unable to attend but would like to know more, we are delighted to share a playlist of videos with more information about our undergraduate courses. You can view the videos on our YouTube channel here.

A Prague Christmas

This post was written by Dr James Partridge, Teaching Fellow in Czech (with Slovak) at Oxford. Here, James tells us about Christmas in the Czech Republic.

My first Christmas in the Czech Republic was back in 1993, when I was still an undergraduate, 3 months into my year abroad in Brno. Christmas customs, though, are usually measured in decades and centuries, so 25 years later my Czech students at Oxford on their years abroad will still see most of the same things I did.

Much of the run up to Christmas (Vánoce) will be familiar to anyone from the UK: packed shops, panic buying, mildly disappointing Christmas markets. Early in December, though, the first Czech Christmas ritual begins: the baking of cukroví – Christmas biscuits. There are many different kinds of cukroví, and most are usually quick and easy to make, but they are made in large quantities. Most families take great pride in baking their own cukroví and have their own favourite recipes, often handed down through the generations. Vanilkové rohličky (vanilla rolls) are made from a simple dough of butter, flour, sugar, egg yolk, a little vanilla sugar, perhaps some ground nuts, pressed into moulds and baked quickly. Medvědí tlapičky (‘bears’ paws’) are made from a similar dough, but flavoured with cocoa. Colourfully decorated gingerbreads are also very popular, and some cukroví such as kokosové kuličky (coconut balls) aren’t baked at all. However you make them, the idea is to make as many as possible so that there will always be a selection available for family and guests for the whole Christmas period, if they last that long.

Christmas day itself (Štědrý den, literally ‘Generous / Bountiful day’) is on December 24th. In the past, Štědrý den was a day of fast and people would eat nothing (or very little) until the evening. In the middle ages, the custom was not to eat meat during the day, but something plain like barley groats with mushrooms. Those who honoured this custom faithfully were rewarded by seeing a vision of a zlaté prasátko (golden pig) in the early evening. Traditionally, the pig is a symbol of abundance and prosperity, and gold represented the passing of the winter solstice, however people nowadays usually just tell their children that you see the golden pig because you are so hungry by sunset that you start hallucinating.

Once you’ve seen the golden pig it’s time to sit down to Christmas dinner and eat until you can eat no more, and the centrepiece of the meal should always be carp. The Czech tradition of eating carp is a very old one, probably dating back a thousand years or more to the early Christian period, when monasteries would construct special fish-ponds for raising carp to eat. The cultivation of carp really took off in southern Bohemia after the early 15th century on the estates of the powerful Rožmberk family, and especially thanks to the work of their celebrated Master of Fisheries Jakub Krčín (1535-1604), who oversaw the building of a network of lakes that still supply carp to this day.

Buying carp before Christmas is a task that many westerners find… disturbing. A week or two before Štědrý den, large blue plastic vats overflowing with water begin to appear outside supermarkets, on street corners and in other places in villages, towns and cities across the country, and these vats are filled with carp, brought up from the lakes of Southern Bohemia. These are big fish: 5-8 kg is a pretty standard size. Long queues form, regardless of freezing winds and snow, and people simply choose their carp from the small shoal swimming around in front of them. Up until quite recently, many families would take their live carp home with them and put it in the bathtub for a few days as a sort of ‘pet’, albeit one whose remaining days were very short in number. Nowadays, the fishmongers who run the carp stalls usually just hoik the animal out of the water, whack it on the head with a hammer and then either wrap it up and give it to the customer (hopefully not still flapping), or behead and gut it on the spot. Once they get going, it doesn’t take long before the pavement is running red with fish blood.

The fish itself is prepared by being filleted, breaded and fried until golden brown, and it is always served with remarkable quantities of potato salad. This may sound easy, but filleting a big carp is serious manual labour, and nothing can go to waste: fish giblet soup is one of the highlights of the whole meal.

Olomouc at Christmastime. Image by Labenord on Pixabay

The other essential component to any Czech Christmas is watching pohádky, which are filmed versions of classic fairy tales. This is a tradition that really took off in the early years of the communist period, and one of the first pohádky is still one of the most loved: Císařův pekař a pekařův císař (The Emperor’s Baker and the Baker’s Emperor, 1951), written by and starring Jan Werich – an actor and writer of great importance in Czech theatre and film history. I should also mention Pyšná princezna (The Proud Princess, 1952), Princezna se zlatou hvězdou (The Princess with the Golden Star, 1959), the extraordinary, expressionist (and genuinely scary) Tři zlaté vlasy Děda Vševěda (The Three Golden Hairs of Grandpa Knowall, 1963), not forgetting the delightful and hugely popular Tři oříšky pro Popelku (Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella, 1973). And no Christmas would be complete without the Russian fairy tale Mrazík (Old Father Frost, 1967). I first saw it in the cinema during that first Christmas in Brno in 1993 and the atmosphere was like a late-night showing of The Rocky Horror Show here in England: the audience knew every word of the story of Ivanko and the lovely Nastěnka, and sang along to the soundtrack of the film.

These classic pohádky are an integral part of the Czech Christmas ritual. The TV papers are eagerly scanned to see when Tři oříšky or Pyšná princezna are showing, and on that basis lunch, supper, or visits to and from friends and family are carefully arranged. More surprisingly still for the uninitiated foreigner, the same films are watched religiously every year and enjoyed just as much as they were in previous years. Pohádky, in short, are as much a part of Christmas as cukroví and carp.

Adventures on the Bookshelf will be taking a break now for Christmas but we’ll be back on 9th January. Have a great festive period and Merry Christmas – or, as they say in Czech, ‘Veselé Vánoce!’