Choosing už versus ještě

Two tiny words, už and ještě, carry an enormous amount of meaning in Czech, and English keeps tripping over them because it splinters the same territory across four different words: already, yet, still, and anymore. The good news is that už and ještě sit on a single clean logic, and once you see it, the four English words sort themselves out automatically. The trick is to stop translating word-for-word and instead think about where on a situation's timeline you are standing.

The core idea

Picture any situation — sleeping, raining, living somewhere — as having a beginning and an end. Už and ještě tell you which side of those boundaries you are on.

• už = the situation has already reached / started its state. ("It's here now; it has begun.")
• ještě = the situation is still going / there is more to come. ("It continues; it hasn't stopped.")

Negate each, and you flip to the opposite boundary:

• už ne = the situation has ended → "not anymore, no longer."
• ještě ne = the situation has not begun → "not yet."

Put together, they trace the whole life of a state in order: ještě ne (not yet) → už (already) → ještě (still) → už ne (no longer). That sequence is the key to everything below.

The 2×2 grid

The cleanest way to feel the system is to run one verb through all four cells. Take spát ("to sleep"):

Read down the timeline: before he drops off (ještě nespí), the moment he's down (už spí), while he stays down (ještě spí), after he's up (už nespí). Every English sentence about this — "not yet," "already," "still," "anymore" — lands in exactly one cell.

už on its own: "already," "now," "finally"

Beyond "already," už often marks a change of state that has just clicked into place — best translated "now" or "finally." It signals that a threshold has been crossed.

In a question, už corresponds to English "yet" (asking whether something has happened by now):

And už ne is the standard way to say something has stopped being the case:

ještě on its own: "still," "yet," "more"

Ještě covers ongoing continuation ("still") but also, very commonly, "more / another" — an additional helping, one more of something, a bit longer.

And ještě ne — "not yet" — is the negative most likely to be mistranslated by English speakers, because English uses the word "yet" in both already-questions and not yet statements.

už versus pořád for "still"

Czech has a second word for "still," pořád (also stále), which stresses unbroken continuation — "the whole time, constantly." Ještě says the state hasn't ended yet; pořád emphasises that it just keeps going. They often overlap, but pořád adds a note of "still, after all this time."

That last example shows the handy už jen ("only ... left now"), where už marks the situation reduced to its final stretch.

už with a duration: "for ... now"

One more high-frequency use: už in front of a time span means "for ... by now," stressing that the duration has piled up to this point. Czech keeps the verb in the plain present (it has no present perfect), and už supplies the "by now" sense that English packs into "have been."

How the English words map

Common mistakes

Every one of these errors comes from translating the English word instead of locating the timeline boundary. Fix it by asking: has the state started (už), ended (už ne), is it continuing (ještě), or not begun (ještě ne)? Pick the cell, and the right word is automatic. For how this interacts with verb aspect — especially "I've already finished" versus "I'm still doing it" — see aspect with 'already' and 'yet'.