The CZCases Linglet is designed to help you master the more regular systems of case endings for czech nouns, adjectives, and demonstratives.
For nouns, it includes the following:
practice categorising nouns into hard and soft types
practice formulating declensions of hard and soft nouns of each gender type for the different czech cases (vocative omitted), both singular and plural forms
practice selection and declension of a noun within shown phrase
For adjectives, it includes the following:
practice formulating declensions of hard and soft adjectives for the different genders and different czech cases, both singular and plural forms
practice selection and declension of an adjective within shown phrase
For demonstratives, it includes the following:
case formulation reference for ten, ta, to
emphasised forms of ten
practice selection and declension of demonstrative within shown phrase
You need a java capable mobile phone with WAP access to run linglets. CZCases has been tested on a Nokia 3510i but should work on other java phone types (please let me know if you make it work on other phone types so I can keep a compatibility list uptodate).
These instructions are for a Nokia phone, for other types the sequence should be similar. You may need to get your phone company to enable WAP and GPRS for your phone.
Go into "applications" from menu, then select second item "App. services", then select options "More bookmks.", then options "New bookmark". Enter the following address "http://wap.linglets.co.uk/index.wml" and then title "linglets". Then select this new bookmark "linglets" from list, and invoke menu option "Go to" - your phone should connect to Linglets web site. Navigate to "available linglets", then "czech", scroll down screen and select "CZCases" and open the link. Your phone should ask you if you want to download the application, press "Dnload", the download will start (can take about 5 minutes, CZCases is maximum size for Nokia MIDlet - about 64K), if download succeeds you should then be able to open application from application menu. If download fails, its worth trying a few more times, as with such a relatively big download you might get a GPRS dropout during download.
Some screens have timeouts where if you don't respond to displayed question within a certain amount of time, the phone will show the answer automatically, then go onto next question. The length of the timeout period and the time the answer is displayed for may be adjusted by changing the values displayed in the preferences screen - the reveal time is how long phone waits before showing answer, and the persist time is how long answer is shown before phone moves onto next questiom.
For vocabulary acquisition, the "details" button may be pressed at any time to show answer, then "cases" button may be pressed repeatedly to cycle through the grammatical cases.
To exit linglet, keep pressing "back" button until main menu is reached, then press "exit" button.
When responding to question about cases endings, selecting the option "<same>" indicates you think the declension of the case is the same as nominative singular case. Selecting the option "<zero>" indicates you think a zero ending is appropriate (e.g. "vod" is zero ending formulation of "voda").
Where alternative endings occur for a case, both are acceptable.
The best scheme for mastering the case endings is to try and remember a few rules (acc = nom for male inanimate and neuter etc.) and then try and find some patterns in the system of cases, e.g. what changes between hard and soft variants.
Some abbreviations used in Czech linglets:
Please let me know if you find any grammatical mistakes in a linglet, and I will try and correct them. Linglets can only contain so much information, so I havn't included all noun types (adjectival nouns and male nouns with female endings like starosta are missing for example).