'No / None': žádný and Negative Concord

Žádný is the Czech word for no, none, or not any — the determiner you put in front of a noun to say there are zero of them: žádné peníze ("no money"), žádný problém ("no problem"). It is easy to translate but it hides a rule that fights every English instinct you have: when žádný appears, the verb must also be negated. Czech says, quite literally, "I don't have no money" — and that double negative is not sloppy, it is the only correct way to say it. This page covers what žádný means, how it declines, and the obligatory negative concord that English-speakers keep forgetting.

What žádný means

Žádný covers the whole English range of no / none / not any as a determiner — it sits in front of a noun and quantifies it at zero. It is the negative answer to "how many / how much": none.

žádný declines like a hard adjective

Žádný is not frozen — it is an adjective in form and agrees with its noun in gender, number, and case, following the regular hard-adjective pattern (the same endings as mladý "young"). Here is the singular across the three genders, plus the plural.

The masculine accusative splits by animacy (žádný for inanimate things, žádného for animate beings), exactly as with any hard adjective. If this table looks familiar, it should — it is just the hard-adjective declension of mladý with a žádn- stem.

The non-negotiable rule: negative concord

Now the rule that matters most. In Czech, a negative word like žádný demands a negated verb. You cannot pair žádný with a positive verb the way English pairs no with a positive have. The verb takes the ne- prefix, and the sentence ends up with two negatives that, far from cancelling, reinforce each other.

This is the opposite of standard English, where "I don't have no money" is a stigmatized error. In Czech it is the rule, and leaving the verb positive (*Mám žádné peníze) is simply ungrammatical. Czech piles negatives up without flinching — you can have three or four in one clause and they all point the same way.

žádný agrees with its noun — including in oblique cases

Because žádný is an adjective, it picks up whatever case its noun is in, even deep inside a prepositional phrase or after a case-governing verb. The negated verb still comes along for the ride.

"None" standing alone

Drop the noun and žádný stands on its own as the pronoun none — still agreeing in gender and number with whatever it refers back to, still demanding a negated verb.

žádný vs nikdo vs nic

Keep three negatives straight. Žádný is a determiner/adjective — it goes with a noun ("no student") or stands for "none of a known set." Nikdo means nobody (a person, no noun attached), and nic means nothing (a thing). Use žádný when you're saying "none of this kind"; use nikdo / nic for a bare "no one / nothing."

Emphatic: "no … whatsoever"

To strengthen žádný into no … at all / no … whatsoever, add vůbec ("at all") in front. It's the everyday way to slam the door.

žádný vs nějaký — the positive counterpart

The mirror image of žádný is nějaký ("some / any"), the affirmative indefinite. Czech keeps them cleanly apart: nějaký goes in positive sentences and questions; žádný goes only with negation. Watch them swap in a quick exchange.

For the wider family of "some / any / certain / other," see nějaký, některý, jiný.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

The negative concord you've learned here is a whole system, not a quirk of one word: every ni- word (nikdo, nic, nikdy, nikde) behaves the same way. See ni-words require a negated verb and multiple negation to make the pattern automatic.