3.9 – na zdraví! dobrou chuť!

Before you take a drink of your beer or have a bite of your food, you should always wish the people you’re eating/drinking with good health and a good appetite. In English we do this too sometimes, just for some reason we do it in French bon appetite. Czechs are quite regular about it.

To say cheers to someone, say na zdraví! – literally, ‘to health!”. This is definitely the most common way to do it, though you’ll also find that people use the everyday informal greetings – čau! nazdar! ahoj! These work just fine and are very common as a way of saying cheers. This only works with people that you’re on ty terms (and if you’re drinking with them, you very well soon may be on informal terms, if not already).

Before someone starts eating, it is always nice to wish them dobrou chuť. Note – the word chuť means appetite, and it is feminine. You can’t tell whether chuť is in the nominative or accusative, because those forms are the same for this noun. Here you see the accusative feminine adjective on the ending and so we can properly guess that the whole phrase is in the accusative. Can you guess why it’s in the accusative?

It turns out that you are wishing the person good appetite, and so good appetite is the direct object of wishing, i.e it is the thing you are wishing the other person. So next time you see someone about to eat something, wish them dobrou chuť!

Images used in this document come from these sources.