A friend of mine claims that the syntaxes of German and Czech are virtually identical and the languages differ only in the vocabulary. He speaks neither language and I speak only the most primitive German and no Czech, but he claims he read this somewhere. To me such a claim seems incredible and more like some sort of justification that Hitler might have used in taking over the Sudentenland. Can any Doper who speaks both languages enlighten me.
I’m no linguistic expert, but I studied German at school and I’ve recently been trying to learn Czech as I spend half my life in Prague.
In my experience they are completely different. German was quite easy for me to learn and the grammar was different to English, but not dramatically so.
Czech on the other hand is a nightmare. The grammar and syntax feels completely alien to me in a way that’s hard to describe. Vocab I can memorize, but I can’t use it correctly.
It seems to be a Slavic thing as I’ve known Russians and Ukrainians who have come to my Czech class and picked up more in an hour than I have in weeks. They are probably helped partly by overlaps in vocab, but I really think it’s a mental thing. Slavs think differently and that’s reflected in the way their language works. Or, it may be the other way around and their language is different which influences the way they think. Orwell would have loved it in a Newspeak kind of way, language influencing thought etc. Some argue that the Cold War was influenced by these different ways of thinking and lack of understanding on both sides.
I’m still waiting for Czech to click, I know once it does I will be able to understand the people better as well as the language. I love the Czech Republic and the people there, I mean no offense by saying they think differently.
I don’t know a lot about Czech, but I do know it is lot more inflected than German, and–as a linguist myself–I find the statement that they “differ only in vocabulary” is just an outright silly thing to say.
Czech has, like most Slavic languages but unlike German, a dual, i.e. a grammatical form for nouns that applies only to statements where the noun in question has the number two; the plural is reserved for numbers greater than two. That’s quite a difference to German.
AFAIK, Slovene is the only language that retains the dual. Proto-Slavic had the dual, though. I speak Polish, and I seem to recall that there may be a couple vestiges of the dual in some set phrases, but they’re not coming to me.
I could see the comparison being made with Slavic languages in general, but not between Slavic languages and German. I picked up on Croatian quite quickly through my Polish language skills, where it was quite often just a matter of dropping the correct vocabulary in the right places with the different inflections for the language, but my Polish did not help me much in learning German, other than being aware of the case system for nouns (although Polish has two more commonly used cases than german, plus one less commonly used one, for a total of seven. German has four cases. I think Czech also has seven.) Then there’s all sorts of screwy stuff in the Slavic languages with how numbers decline.
Also, Czech (like Polish) also has a distinction between animate and inanimate masculine gender for declining the noun in certain cases. Also, the grammatic concept of aspect is seen in Slavic languages (including Czech), but standard German does not have them.
Tell your friend he is wrong. 
Interestingly, early German languages did have a dual form for nouns, which continued into Old English for pronouns. As far as the OP’s question is concerned though, I think the claim Czech and German have the grammar (or even similar grammar) is ridiculous.
Yeah. Ask your friend what evidence he has to back this up. Sounds like total nonsense to me. Czech, like Polish, is written in the Roman alphabet (unlike most Slavic languages which are generally written in the Cyrillic), but that is usually a function of Religion, not anything linguistic. Catholic (or closely related) = Roman Alphabet; Orthodox (or similar) = Cyrillic. The classic case of that is Serbo-Croatian. One language, 2 alphabets depending on the traditional religion of the regions.
Thanks all; you have completely confirmed my belief.
As the linguistic angle has already been answered, I’d like to add that a claim of similarity of Czech with German language was not to my knowledge advanced by German propaganda at the time. The propaganda message was, rather, that Czechs were different, and oppressed the German minority.
I would only quibble with the word “most” in your parenthetic comment. It’s pretty evenly divided. The West-Slavonic languages are uniformly Latin alphabet. The East-Slavonic languages are uniformly Cyrillic. The South-Slavonic languages are split (as you noted, largely based upon religion). Since there are a wealth of West-Slavonic languages, the overall totals for each alphabet are pretty much even, depending upon how you count the languages.
I just re-read this, and I meant to say “AFAIK, Slovene is the only Slavic language that retains the dual.”
Yeah, but I was weighting each language by the geographic area over which it is spoken.
Anyway, I stand corrected!
Yes, if you do that, Cyrillic wins for sure! 
Nitpick: syntax is just one part of a language’s grammar, the part that concerns word order, sentence structure, etc. Other aspects of grammar such as number and gender are not part of syntax.
German does have distinctive syntax, notably in the way that verbs have a habit of flying to the far end of clauses, which can be a problem when a sentence is long and parenthetical.
As Mark Twain observed in his tongue-in-cheek critique The Awful German Language,
*…here is a sentence from a popular and excellent German novel […]
I will make a perfectly literal translation, and throw in the parenthesis-marks and some hyphens for the assistance of the reader – though in the original there are no parenthesis-marks or hyphens, and the reader is left to flounder through to the remote verb the best way he can:
Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide gehüllten jetzt sehr ungenirt nach der neusten Mode gekleideten Regierungsräthin begegnet.
“But when he, upon the street, the (in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed) government counselor’s wife met,”
[…] in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all.*
I’m not sure that Czech has anything similar.
Slavic languages are more like the older indo-european languages, keeping full noun declentions, a freer word order etc. German has been grammatically more simplified, and has created a unique syntax with no analog in any other language I think. It has the v2 word order, that is, the finite verb of a main clause must remain in the second position and the object put after the verb, if the sentence starts with anything other than the subject. Infinitives, participles, verbs of subordinate clauses and particles of separable verbs go at the end of the sentence. That obliges someone to first read fully or listen with his full attention before commenting, and that is unique in any language. Dutch has also a similar word order, but with much more relaxed rules. Most older indo-european languages put the berb at final position, but word order could vary according to the emphasis given in a specific part of the sentence.
Used to be 3 alphabets. Bosnian S-C used the Arabic alphabet prior to the Austro-Hungarian takeover of Bosnia in 1878. They had special adaptations of the Arabic letters to write the S-C phonemes accurately. Kind of like what they’ve done with the Latin alphabet.
Again, a question of religion, quite obviously.