7.7 – Time for Completion
If you want to express how long it took to complete an action, we’ll use the preposition za accusative of a time expression.
Napsala jsem email za pět minut.
I wrote an email (to completion) in five minutes.
This corresponds to the question za jak dlouho ‘in how long?’
Often times these types of expressions can correspond to a sentence in English it took ___ time to do / complete something. However, this is a much less literal translation.
Přečetl jsem tu knihu za tři hodiny.
I read that book in three hours / It took me three hours to read that book.
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1
with accusative singular |
za (jednu) sekundu 'in one second’ za (jednu) minutu 'in one minute’ za (jednu) hodinu 'in one hour’
za (jeden) den 'in one day’
za (jeden) týden 'in one week’
za (jeden)měsíc 'in one month’
za (jeden) rok ‘in one year’ |
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2-4
with accusative plural |
za dvě minuty 'in two minutes’ za tři minuty 'in three minutes’ za čtyři minuty 'in four minutes’
za dvě hodiny 'in two hours’ za tři hodiny 'in three hours’ za čtyři hodiny 'in four hours’
za dva měsíce ‘in two months’ za tři roky ‘in three years’ |
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5
genitive plural (here the number if followed by the unit in the genitive plural) |
za pět hodin 'in five hours’
za šest dní[1] 'in six days’
za osm měsíců 'in eight months’ |
Images used in this document come from these sources.
[1] dní (or less commonly dnů) is the genitive plural of den