Unregelmäßige Vergangenheitsformen

You already live with irregular pasts: go - went, eat - ate, bring - brought. Czech has far fewer, but the ones it has are among the most frequent verbs in the language, so they turn up in your first conversations. For these verbs "drop the -t, add -l" does not work, and the l-form has to be learned with the infinitive, the way you once learned went with go.

The ones you need first

Everything else about the past stays the same: jsem, jsi, jsme, jste in the first and second person, nothing in the third, and the gender endings -l, -la, -lo, -li, -ly.

One family for free

Every verb built on -jít follows šel: přijít → přišel (came), odejít → odešel (left), najít → našel (found), vyjít → vyšel (went out). Learn šel/šla once and you have the whole group: Přišla pozdě - "She came late"; Našel jsem klíče - "I found the keys".

"Went" is two verbs in Czech

English went covers walking, driving and flying. Czech splits it: šel if you went on foot, jel if anything with wheels or rails carried you. Jel comes from jet, and it is perfectly regular. So Šel jsem do obchodu is a walk to the shop, but Jel jsem do Brna is a train or a car, unless you really did walk two hundred kilometres.

And keep jel apart from jedl. One d is the difference between travelling and eating: Jel jsem do Plzně (I went to Pilsen) against Jedl jsem knedlíky (I ate dumplings). On Christmas Eve a Czech family says Jedli jsme kapra a bramborový salát - "We ate carp and potato salad".

The mistakes to expect

Learners run these verbs through the regular rule and get *chtíl, *čísl or *pécl. None of these is a word. The fix is not a cleverer rule but a habit: when one of the verbs in the table comes up, reach for its l-form whole, the way you reach for went without thinking about go.