Learning Czech from a country where literally nobody speaks it

I want to preface this by saying I know how this sounds. I live in India. I am learning Czech. The number of people I can practice with in my city is exactly zero.

It started because of a trip I took to Prague two years ago. Something about the city just got under my skin. The architecture, the people, the way the language sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. I came back home and thought about it for six months before I finally decided to just start learning.

The first problem was finding resources. Czech is not Spanish. There is no massive community, no easy obvious path forward. I pieced things together slowly. Anki with a Czech frequency deck every morning. Grammar PDFs I found scattered across random corners of the internet. Czech YouTube channels playing in the background while I cooked. Occasional lessons on italki when I could fit them around work.

But speaking was the piece I kept avoiding because there was literally no outlet for it. I was building vocabulary and understanding grammar in a complete vacuum with no way to actually use any of it. I started using Issen mostly out of desperation since I genuinely had nobody to talk to. My sentences were slow and broken and probably painful. But something about actually producing Czech out loud every day instead of just staring at flashcards started changing how the language felt in my head. It stopped being symbols on a screen and started feeling like something I could actually use.

Four months in I had a short text conversation with a Czech person online and understood most of it. That felt enormous from where I started.

Czech is genuinely hard and learning it with zero community around you is lonelier than I expected. But Prague is still somewhere in the back of my head and that turns out to be enough.