Functional Text: A Curriculum Vitae

A Czech CV — a životopis — is one of the most useful texts a learner can dissect, because it packs an enormous amount of grammar into very little prose. There are almost no full sentences: instead you get clipped, telegraphic noun phrases, date spans, and place names, each carrying exactly one piece of information. That compression is itself a register — the impersonal, economical style expected of formal documents — and reading a CV closely teaches you three things at once: how Czech expresses dates and time spans (with prepositions that each demand a particular case), how it names places of study and work (the locative after na and v), and how it states a profession (jako plus the nominative). This page walks through a realistic životopis line by line.

The text

Jan Novák Narozen 15. března 1990 v Praze.

Vzdělání 2010–2015: studium translatologie na Univerzitě Karlově v Praze. 2006–2010: Gymnázium Jana Keplera, Praha.

Pracovní zkušenosti Od roku 2016 pracuji jako překladatel z angličtiny a němčiny. 2015–2016: redaktor v nakladatelství Argo.

Jazyky: angličtina (C2), němčina (C1), francouzština (B1).

Notice how few finite verbs there are: just one (pracuji, "I work"). Everything else is a noun phrase hanging off a date or a heading. This is normal and correct — a CV that wrote everything out in full sentences would read as stilted.

Narozen 15. března 1990 v Praze

The opening line alone contains three grammar points worth slowing down for.

Narozen — "born", masculine. This is a short (nominal) passive participle, a clipped form used in exactly this kind of label. The everyday verb is reflexive — narodit se, "to be born" — but the document drops the se and the auxiliary and leaves the bare participle, which agrees in gender with the person: a man writes narozen, a woman writes narozena. It functions like a stamped heading, "Born:", not like a normal verb.

15. března — "on the 15th of March". Czech dates put both the day and the month in the genitive: the ordinal patnáctého ("of-the-fifteenth") and the month března ("of March", from březen). The little dot after 15 is how Czech writes ordinals — 15. is read patnáctého here, not patnáct. The whole phrase answers kdy? ("when?") with a bare genitive, no preposition needed. See The Genitive in Dates for the full system.

v Praze — "in Prague". Place where something happens takes v + the locative. Praha shifts to Praze (the h softens to z before the locative ending), a change you will meet in many feminine place names. The locative is the case you reach for whenever you locate an event or a residence.

Vzdělání: studium na Univerzitě Karlově v Praze

The education section turns on a single high-value pattern: na + locative for an institution you study at.

na Univerzitě Karlově — "at Charles University". Two facts collide here. First, Czech uses na (not v) with universities, faculties, schools and similar institutions: na univerzitě, na fakultě, na základní škole, na gymnáziu. Second — and this is the part learners drop — both words go into the locative, because an adjective always agrees with its noun in case. Univerzita Karlova (nominative) becomes Univerzitě Karlově (locative): the noun Univerzita → Univerzitě, and the possessive adjective Karlova → Karlově. You cannot freeze the name and inflect only the front of it.

studium translatologie — "the study of translation". Studium is a neuter noun (the genitive of the thing studied follows it: translatologie, "of translation studies"). It heads the phrase wordlessly — there is no verb "I studied"; the date 2010–2015 and the noun studium do all the work.

Gymnázium Jana Keplera — the name of a Prague secondary school, literally "the Gymnasium of Jan Kepler". The personal name sits in the genitive (Jan Kepler → Jana Keplera) because it names whom the school is dedicated to — the same "of X" relationship as in Náměstí Míru or ulice Karla Čapka.

Od roku 2016 pracuji jako překladatel

The work section shows off two more patterns: a time preposition with the year, and the way Czech names a job.

Od roku 2016 — "since 2016". The preposition od ("from / since") governs the genitive, so rok ("year") appears as roku. Czech does not put the bare year after od; it says od roku 2016, literally "from the year 2016". The mirror image is v roce 2016 ("in 2016"), where v takes the locative and rok becomes roce. Same noun, two cases, chosen by the preposition.

Note also the tense: pracuji is the simple present, "I work / I have been working". Czech has no present perfect, so an activity that started in the past and continues now is just the present tense paired with od roku. English needs "have worked"; Czech needs only pracuji.

jako překladatel — "as a translator". To state the role someone fills, Czech uses jako + the nominative: the profession stays in its dictionary form. This is the construction for pracovat jako ("to work as") and sloužit jako ("to serve as"). It contrasts sharply with the other way of naming a profession — být + the instrumental (jsem překladatelem, "I am a translator"). After jako you do not use the instrumental.

That instrumental-versus-jako split trips up nearly every learner; the dedicated page Profession with být lays it out in full.

z angličtiny a němčiny — "from English and German". The source language of a translation takes z + genitive (angličtina → angličtiny, němčina → němčiny). And redaktor v nakladatelství Argo ("an editor at the Argo publishing house") gives one more v + locative — nakladatelství is an -í neuter, so its locative looks identical to the nominative, a quiet feature of that whole noun class.

The telegraphic register

Step back and look at what holds the document together. There are headings (Vzdělání, Pracovní zkušenosti, Jazyky), date spans (2010–2015), and noun phrases — and almost no verbs. This verbless, list-like style is not lazy; it is the expected register for a CV, a form, or a programme. Czech achieves the compression by letting case endings carry the relationships that English would spell out with verbs and prepositions: studium translatologie needs no "I did", because the genitive already links studium to its object.

A date span like 2010–2015 is read aloud as od roku dva tisíce deset do roku dva tisíce patnáct — od and do both pull the genitive roku, and the years themselves are read as cardinal numbers. For how the years are spoken, see Reading Years.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• A životopis is written in a telegraphic, verbless register: headings, date spans, and noun phrases, with case endings doing the connecting.
• Narozen / narozena is a short participle that agrees in gender — a label, not a normal verb.
• Dates use the genitive (
  15. března
  , od roku 2016), while v roce 2016 uses the locative — the preposition picks the case.
• Places of study and work take na/v + the locative, and every word of a named institution inflects: na Univerzitě Karlově.
• A profession after jako stays in the nominative (jako překladatel); the instrumental belongs only with být.