I will be planning a trip to the Czech Republic, and I'm curious to know what other languages are spoken there. English is my only language, but I do have a working knowledge of French and German. I'd be interested in learning some Czech, but I'm not sure if I would have the opportunity to do that - hard to find language CDs, etc. Could you please advise me if there are other accessible languages that would be useful? Thanks much.

Many of the older generation (people who went to school before World War II) speak German.

Many of the post-war generation (people who went to school between 1948 (I think, Communist take-over of Czechoslovakia) and 1989) speak Russian.

I imagine many more people now speak English than French.

From our experience in rural areas ( we have not visited Prague) german will be very helpful and many still knew russian when asked.

In Prague, the baby boomers and previous generations speak German and Russian; the younger people all speak some English

I meant to add:
Every tourism-oriented site (restaurants, museums, churches) had signs, brochurs, employees offering English info

I cannot speak for the whole country but I can share with you my experience with English alone in the places I visited. I actually had a pretty hard time to communicate in a spa town (Marianske Lazne) which I stayed couple of weeks. Almost everyone spoke Russian and/or German and finding someone to speak English was a rarity. The young generation spoke some broken English. I ran into more people who spoke English in Karlovy Vary but I still remember how difficult it was to find out which direction train I got to get on when no one knew English there. In contrast to the other two places, I absolutely had no problem in Prague with knowing English only. What I understood was that after Russian takeover, Russian was the 2nd language and the older generation knows Russian. These days, English is the 2nd language. I felt knowing English only is a bit of a handicapped.

There are little centres of different languages depending on where you go in Czech i.e. Karlovy Vary has a large Russian community, The further south and west you go, the more people speak German. The more east you go, it turns toward Slovakian (where many words look similar but sound different). If you are interested in the Czech language go to www.bohemica.com and look at their resources. You'll also find the following link http://mujweb.cz/www/winczeduc/ which is about the best language cd for advanced Czech that I know.

Jason
www.livingprague.com

from my experience living in prague for about 6 months and working with some french and germans is that english is the most useful language after czech.

i do agree with others that russian and german are spoken but after czech, english is most useful, in my experience. you may find some people who know german or russian better than english but overall, you'll find english much wider spoken.

czech and prague in particular is a magnet for europeans seeking a new life participating in the booming economy for educated and business minded people, therefore you may encounter italians, germans, austrians, swiss, etc.

Thanks everyone for your help. To be safe, I think I'll brush up on my German. Also, thank you Jason for the web sites in your post. I will look into that.

www.livinglingo.com
allows you to practice Czech words and phrases out loud, on line

My husband and I went to Prague a few years ago and only ran into a few times where we had a language barrier. We checked out a "Learn How to Speak Czech" tape from the library before we went and tried to learn some basic words(please, thank you, enter, exit....), it was helpful.
Good luck and have fun!