Početnica češkoga jezika

A Beginner's Guide to the Czech Language is a booklet published in Zagreb in 1915 by Vojtěch (Vojtjeh) Režný. The work was written during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, at a time of strong Czech-Croatian cultural and political ties between the Slavic peoples.

The author, a Czech teacher and activist among the Czech minority, dedicated the booklet to the 500th anniversary of the death of Jan Hus (1415). In the preface, Režný emphasizes the similarities of fate of the Czech and Croatian peoples and his desire to bring the Czech language closer to Croatian students who studied in Prague, as well as to a wider audience interested in Slavic mutuality. He compares Hus with Ljudevit Gaj as a great reformer of the literary language.

The booklet is intended for complete beginners. It begins with detailed instructions for pronunciation and reading, adapted to the Croatian reader: it explains Czech stress (always on the first syllable), vowel length (marked by a hyphen), and special sounds such as ř, ě, ch, ť, ď and ň. This is followed by a spelling review (with an emphasis on the morphological-etymological approach to Czech spelling), and then systematic grammar (declension of nouns by gender and species, the difference between animate and inanimate in the masculine gender, the declension of adjectives, verbs, pronouns and numbers).

It contains numerous paradigms, example sentences and practical notes on the differences between the Czech and Croatian languages. shorter texts for reading and exercises are added at the end. The work is not a comprehensive scientific grammar, but a clear and practical beginner's textbook.

The Beginner's Guide to the Czech Language is today a bibliographic rarity, available in national libraries and digital archives. It represents an important testimony to Czech-Croatian cultural relations in the early 20th century and one of the early systematic attempts to teach the Czech language to Croats. Režný later continued to work on educational and cultural publications for the Czech minority in Yugoslavia.