Text: A Train Announcement

A Czech railway-station announcement is a perfect compression of B1 grammar: a scheduled-event present tense, two prepositions that each demand the genitive, an ordinal used as a platform number, and the 24-hour clock with its numeral-noun agreement. If you can fully parse the single sentence below, you can parse almost any departure board in the country. Here it is, exactly as the loudspeaker says it.

Rychlík do Ostravy odjíždí z prvního nástupiště ve třináct hodin deset minut.

The express train to Ostrava departs from platform one at thirteen-ten (13:10).

We will take it apart phrase by phrase, then generalise each point.

"odjíždí" — the scheduled present

The verb is odjíždí, the third-person singular present of the imperfective odjíždět ("to depart, to be departing"). Czech, like English, uses a present form for timetabled future events: the train departs at 13:10, not will depart. The choice of the imperfective is deliberate. A timetable describes a regular, repeating, scheduled event — and the imperfective is the aspect of habit and schedule. The perfective partner odjet (odjede, "will depart / will have left") would frame one specific completed departure, which is what you say about a particular train on a particular day, not what the timetable-style announcement uses.

"do Ostravy" — destination with do + genitive

The destination is do Ostravy, "to Ostrava." The preposition do ("to, into") always takes the genitive, so the city name Ostrava (a feminine žena-type noun) becomes the genitive Ostravy. This do + genitive is the default way to say you are heading to a town, a country, or any bounded destination you go into: do Prahy, do Brna, do Německa.

Do not confuse do with k/ke (+ dative), which means "towards / up to" a person or point without entering it. For trains and towns, the in-bound preposition is do; the contrast is laid out on the do vs. k page.

"z prvního nástupiště" — the ordinal platform, z + genitive

Departure is announced away from the platform, so the announcement uses z/ze ("from, out of"), which also governs the genitive. The platform itself is named with an ordinal number: platform 1 is první nástupiště, platform 2 druhé nástupiště, and so on. Ordinals decline like adjectives, so in the genitive after z, první becomes prvního and the neuter noun nástupiště stays nástupiště (this soft -iště neuter has the same form in nominative and genitive).

So the whole phrase z prvního nástupiště = "from the first platform." Swap in any platform number and the ordinal must follow into the genitive:

Note that z picks up an -e (ze) before the awkward clusters in druhého and třetího — the regular vocalisation that keeps the preposition pronounceable. Arrivals, by contrast, are announced na + accusative (motion onto the platform): vlak přijede na první nástupiště ("the train will arrive at platform one"). Departure is from (z + genitive); arrival is onto (na + accusative).

"ve třináct hodin deset minut" — the 24-hour clock

Public transport in Czechia runs on the 24-hour clock, so 1:10 p.m. is announced as třináct hodin deset minut — literally "thirteen hours ten minutes." The time-when is introduced by v/ve + accusative: ve třináct hodin ("at thirteen hundred"). The preposition vocalises to ve before the cluster tř-.

The numeral-noun agreement is the part to watch. Czech cardinals 5 and above govern the genitive plural of the counted noun. Thirteen is well above five, so hodina ("hour") appears as the genitive plural hodin, and minuta ("minute") as the genitive plural minut:

So 13:10 is třináct *hodin deset minut* (both nouns genitive plural), while 2:04 would be dvě *hodiny čtyři minuty* (the 2–4 forms). The hours and minutes are simply placed side by side — Czech announcements put no "a" ("and") between them.

Putting it back together

With every piece glossed, the announcement reads as a tidy sequence: subject (rychlík) + destination (do Ostravy, do + gen) + scheduled-present verb (odjíždí) + source platform (z prvního nástupiště, z + gen + ordinal) + time (ve třináct hodin deset minut, v + acc, numerals + gen pl). Czech word order lets all of this flow without the rigid scaffolding English needs.

Common mistakes

To rehearse this whole scene as a conversation rather than a notice, see the buying train tickets dialogue; for the ordinals themselves, see ordinal formation and declension and telling the time.