ABSTRACT
Czech nouns have a feature of grammar which calls gender. Czech nouns are divided into three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but grammatically we have to distinguish between masculine animates and masculine inanimates. Czech has no neutral gender. In addition, categorising Czech nouns by gender helps to identify what endings they will use in different grammatical cases. Most nouns have forms for both the singular and the plural. Czech nouns change their endings for various purposes, not just for the plural, producing what are called different ‘cases’. To go through the various cases of a noun is called to ‘decline’ it, and the resulting table is a ‘declension’. Cases are initially one of the hardest things for English speakers to master in the language. There are seven different cases in Czech, called nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, instrumental and vocative. Cases have both singular and plural forms.
