Dialogue: Weather Small Talk

Weather is the universal opener, and in Czech it quietly drills a feature that English speakers find genuinely strange: weather sentences have no subject at all. There is no Czech "it" doing the raining. This short exchange — two neighbours on a doorstep — packs in the subjectless weather pattern, the adverb that stands in for an adjective, a bare accusative for "all day," and the gossipy little particle prý.

The text

— Dneska je hezky, ale včera pršelo celý den. — Prý bude zítra sněžit.

Two neighbours: one notes the change in the weather, the other passes on a forecast they heard. Naturally: "It's nice today, but yesterday it rained all day. — They say it's going to snow tomorrow."

Word by word

Dneska je hezky, ale včera pršelo celý den.

• Dneska — "today," the colloquial form; the neutral/written form is dnes.
• je — "is," third person singular of být — but here with no subject at all. It is the impersonal "is" of weather.
• hezky — "nicely," an adverb, not the adjective hezký. After impersonal je, the weather predicate is adverbial: je hezky = "it's nice (out)."
• ale — "but."
• včera — "yesterday."
• pršelo — "(it) rained," from pršet. Third person singular, neuter, and again subjectless — the -o ending is the default neuter the language uses when there is nothing to agree with.
• celý den — "the whole day," in the accusative of duration, with no preposition. This is how long the raining lasted.

Prý bude zítra sněžit.

• Prý — "reportedly / they say / apparently," an evidential particle. It flags that the speaker is passing on second-hand information, not vouching for it.
• bude — "(it) will be," the future of být; here the auxiliary of an imperfective future.
• zítra — "tomorrow."
• sněžit — "to snow," infinitive. Bude sněžit is the imperfective future: "it will snow," again with no subject.

Grammar in action

Weather has no subject

English weather sentences need a placeholder subject — the empty "it" in "it's raining," "it's nice," "it'll snow." That "it" refers to nothing; it is there only because an English sentence is required to have a subject. Czech has no such requirement, so it simply leaves the subject slot empty. The verb sits in its default third-person-singular neuter form and carries the whole meaning by itself. This is the heart of impersonal constructions.

In each of these, looking for "what is it that rains/freezes/is overcast" is a wrong-track question — there is no it. The verb alone says everything.

Hezky, not hezký: the adverbial predicate

The trickiest piece of je hezky is that you must use the adverb hezky, not the adjective hezký. Why? An adjective has to agree with a noun, and here there is no noun — no subject — for it to agree with. So Czech reaches for the genderless, agreement-free adverb instead. Compare:

The same pattern runs through the whole weather vocabulary, all of it adverbial after impersonal je: je zima "it's cold," je horko "it's hot," je teplo "it's warm," je chladno "it's chilly," je krásně "it's beautiful," je ošklivo "it's nasty," je zataženo "it's overcast." The general weather toolkit is collected on the weather expressions page.

Celý den — the accusative of duration

"How long did it rain?" is answered with a bare accusative, no preposition: pršelo celý den "it rained (for) the whole day." English needs "for"; Czech uses the accusative alone to measure a span of time. The pattern stretches to any length: celou noc "all night," celý týden "all week," celé léto "all summer," tři hodiny "for three hours." The full account is on the accusative of time and duration page.

Prý — reporting what you heard

Prý is a small word that does a precise job: it marks the statement as second-hand, something you heard rather than witnessed — "they say," "apparently," "reportedly." It is a particle, not a verb, so it does not conjugate and does not take že "that." It usually sits early in the clause. More on this evidential family is on the prý and reportative marking page.

Bude sněžit — the imperfective future

Sněžit and pršet are imperfective verbs, so their future is built the regular way: the future of být (budu, budeš, bude...) plus the infinitive. Bude sněžit = "it will snow." Crucially the second element is the infinitive, never a present-tense form — a point covered on the imperfective future with budu page.

Usage and culture note

Weather is the safe, neutral small talk of bus stops, lifts, and shop queues — Dneska je ale hezky, viďte? ("Lovely day, isn't it?") with the tag viďte expecting agreement. Notice that Czechs lean on prý the moment a forecast is involved, precisely because nobody wants to be blamed for a wrong prediction: Prý bude pršet keeps the speaker safely at arm's length from the claim. And because the weather is subjectless, you can string a whole conversation together — Je hezky. Včera pršelo. Zítra bude sněžit. — without ever naming a single thing. That subjectlessness is the grammatical signature of the whole topic.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Weather sentences have no subject — no Czech "it." The verb stands alone in default third-person neuter (prší, pršelo, bude sněžit).
• The "nice / cold / hot" predicate is an adverb (hezky, zima, horko), because there is no noun for an adjective to agree with.
• "All day / all night / all summer" is a bare accusative of duration — no preposition (celý den, celou noc, celé léto).
• Prý flags second-hand information — "they say"; it is a particle and never takes že.
• The imperfective future is bude
  • infinitive (bude sněžit, bude pršet).