Short-Form Adjectives: rád, zdráv, hoden

Modern Czech adjectives almost always end in -ý / -á / -é (hard) or -í (soft) and decline through all seven cases. But the language preserves a handful of short-form (also called nominal) adjectives — relics of an older system in which adjectives, like nouns, had short endings. These survive only as predicates, after a verb like být ("to be"), and can never stand in front of a noun. By far the most important of them is rád, which is not really translatable as an adjective at all in English: it is how Czech says someone likes doing something or is glad. This page covers rád in depth, then the smaller club of survivors — zdráv, hoden, jist, spokojen and the past-passive participles — and explains the one rule that ties them all together: short form = predicate only.

What "short form" means

Compare the ordinary long adjective zdravý ("healthy") with its short form zdráv:

• Long (attributive or predicative): zdravý člověk ("a healthy person"), Je zdravý ("He is healthy").
• Short (predicative only): Je zdráv ("He is well / in good health") — but never *zdráv člověk.

The long form does everything; the short form is a stylistically marked, predicate-only alternative. Short forms have no full case paradigm — they exist essentially in the nominative, marking only gender and number, because their only job is to be a predicate complement agreeing with the subject. For the general distinction between the two positions, see Attributive vs Predicative Position.

rád — the essential one

rád means "glad / pleased", but its real workhorse function is to express liking an activity when combined with a verb, and liking a thing in the phrase mít rád. Crucially, rád is not an invariable adverb — it agrees in gender and number with the subject, like the short-form adjective it is.

rád + verb = "to like doing"

Put rád with a conjugated verb and you get "to like to do X / to enjoy doing X." The verb carries the action; rád colours it as enjoyed, and agrees with whoever is doing it.

Look at how the form tracks the speaker: a man says rád vařím, a woman says ráda vařím. English has no way to show this; Czech makes the gender of the subject audible in the very word for "gladly."

mít rád = "to like / to be fond of" (a thing or person)

To say you like a thing or person (not an activity), Czech uses mít rád ("to have-fond"). Here rád agrees with the subject (the liker), and the thing liked is the object of mít, in the accusative.

In Mám rád kávu, the speaker (the subject of mám) governs the form rád/ráda; kávu is just the accusative object. So a woman says Mám ráda kávu — the ráda still agrees with her, not with the (feminine) coffee. To choose between mít rád, líbit se and chutnat, see Choosing mít rád, líbit se, or chutnat.

rád in the conditional: "would like"

Combined with the conditional, rád yields the polite "would like to":

Here rád still agrees with the subject (rádi for a mixed/male group, ráda for a woman), riding alongside the conditional auxiliary bychom / bych.

The other survivors

A small, mostly (formal) or (literary) set of short forms persists, almost all with a normal long form that handles everyday use. Learn to recognize them; produce mainly rád and the past-passive participles.

Buď zdráv (to a man) / Buď zdráva (to a woman) is a warm, slightly old-fashioned farewell — a fossilized short-form blessing.

Note that hoden governs the genitive of the thing one is worthy of (hoden obdivu — "worthy of admiration"). Several of these short forms keep older government patterns, another sign of their archaic roots.

In careful and official Czech, spokojen is very common in the predicate (Jsem spokojen on a feedback form), even though spokojený would not be wrong.

Past-passive participles are short forms too

The same short-form ending appears, fully alive and productive, in the participial passive: the passive participle in -n / -t takes short endings and agrees with the subject. This is not archaic at all — it is the standard way to form the passive.

Here zavřeny (fem./inanimate plural), rozbito (neuter sg.) and splněny agree with their subjects in the short-form pattern — dveře jsou zavřeny, not zavřené (the long form zavřené shifts the meaning toward a description rather than a reported state/action). The contrast between this short participial passive and the long adjectival form is one of the genuinely tricky points of Czech; it is treated fully in The Participial Passive.

Why no attributive use?

The short form has no place before a noun because, historically, that slot was taken over entirely by the long ("definite") forms centuries ago — the long ending originally carried a definiteness/specificity meaning, and it eventually monopolized the attributive position. The short forms were left stranded in the predicate, where being non-attributive does no harm. This is why rád can only ever follow the verb and why zdráv člověk is impossible: there is simply no living attributive short form left to fill that gap.

Common Mistakes

rád is not invariable. A female subject takes ráda, a male subject rád, a mixed/male group rádi.

In mít rád, the short form agrees with the subject (the person who likes), not with the thing liked. A woman saying this would correctly use Mám ráda kávu — but a man must say rád.

Before a noun you must use the long form (zdravý). The short zdráv exists only as a predicate (Je zdráv).

For the participial passive — a state resulting from an action, or the action itself — Czech uses the short participle (zavřeny), not the long adjectival zavřené.

Key Takeaways

• Short-form (nominal) adjectives appear only as predicates and never before a noun.
• rád / ráda / rádi / rády agrees in gender and number with the subject and is the main living short form: rád + verb = "like doing," mít rád = "like a thing/person," rád + conditional = "would like."
• The other survivors — zdráv, nemocen, hoden, jist, spokojen, bos — are formal or literary; use their long forms in everyday speech.
• Some keep old government, e.g. hoden
  • genitive.
• Past-passive participles in -n / -t are short forms too, and these are fully standard: dveře jsou zavřeny, okno bylo rozbito — neuter sg. -o, fem./inanimate pl. -y.