Free Audio Collection of Czech words

The "Audio Collection of Czech words" is a collection of audio recordings which contains about 3500 Czech words and expressions.

The content of this collection is distributed under the "Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States" licence. You can then freely download, modifify, or distribute it.

Obviously, these recordings can be used by any learner of the Czech language to get acquainted with the real pronunciation of the words. Nonetheless, the main goal of this collection is to provide ressources for the creation of pedagogic material by integrating the recordings into electronic dictionaries, pedagogic platforms, or into educational softwares.

The Project

All the words used in the collection are taken from a frequency list made out of a written corpus. This technique has the advantage of quickly offering a large amount of most-frequently-used words, but it has also the disadvantage of providing us with out-of-context lonely words, or lemmas. For example, reflexive verbs such as "vydat se" (to go somewhere) have been recorded without the particle "se" («vydat»).

Veronika Daňková has recorded this first set of words and a smaller second set has been added (about 600 audio files). The second set words were taken from personal vocabulary wordlists. It has been recorded par Ivana K. and contains more phrases such as "jmenovat se" or "jezdit na návštěvu" (visit someone). We have also recorded the present tense forms of some simple verbs (být, vědět, mít...) using personal pronouns* (já vím, ty víš, on ví...).

About 300 Czech numerals have also been recorded (1, 2, 3, 4...333, 444, 900, 1000, 2000...100000)

All the recordings were made using the Shtooka Recorder software and a RF condenser microphone (Oktava MK-012) along with a professional pre-amplifier.

Online Consultation

You can consult the collections online by using the web interface:

• Online consultation.

  

Software for consultation

You can consult this audio collection and other packages (Chinese, Russian, English, Dutch, Swedish, Czech...) (with a total of more than 45 000 words) by using the Shtooka Explorer program which is freely available under a GPL license.

You will be able to install these collections on your computer and consult them offline.

• Download this collection from www.swac-collections.org (please, choose the "ces-balm-veronika" package)

We provide also the "ces-balm-ivana" and "ces-balm-veronika-num" packages.

Recording Session with Veronika Daňková. Moscou. October 2007.

Note:

* Although in the Czech language, personal pronouns are used only to insist on the subject of the action, in our collection, they help understanding which verb form to use.