How Hard is Hungarian? | Some personal Reflections

[@annarboriter]

I fully agree that one major hurdle is the lack of study materials. I've been using an app for a few years now and it still doesn't fully support Hungarian. There is more support for those studying Icelandic! This is compounded by a pattern that I've detected whereby online Hungarian language apps simply reverseengineer English learning tools for Hungarians. It's very common for Google, for example, to render a straightforward Hungarian sentence from active into the passive voice because that is how the translation must function for Hungarians students of English but this is not all helpful for those who want to better understand Hungarian. I will challenge you though that there are few borrowings from IE languages that can assist students. I find that it's also the case that even well educated Hungarians don't recognize the French vocabulary imported into Hungarian during the 19th century when the French language was the dominant lingua franca in the sciences, literature, and diplomacy. One can also recognize terms borrowed from German, for example, if one examines closely e.g. polgár from German Bürger and from Polish, likely: kolbász, káposzta Lastly, the main challenges with Hungarian verbs is understanding which prefixes affect aspect and which ones alter definitions, sometimes, quite unexpectedly . I have yet to find a good online learner's dictionary that can cite transitivity and, as you point out, which postpositions a verb governs

[@HungarianKiwiNZ]

Have you tried DeepL? I find it quite useful although the vocab isn't as extensive as other translators who get the grammar and idioms wrong :-) Yes, there ae borrowings. A big hunk of "international" words which come from Latin. So "auto" instead of "kocsi". Most Hungarians will understand the international words - but won't use them by default so if you are conversing you need to know the Hungarian word to understand what is being talked about. Wrt dictionaries, go for paper.

[@annarboriter]

@@HungarianKiwiNZ while I agree with you that the influence of Latin has a long history of influence, I have found that knowing French has helped me with acquiring vocabulary, for example, trükk is clearly from French truc but it can be difficult to recognize due to Hungarian orthographic conventions. Some vocabulary might have entered the language via German during the dual monarchy. I pointed out to a native speaker that the Hungarian duo, Padödõ, take their name from French. He never made that connection. I concede that some of this might be related to a language that is so phonetically represents sounds that words' origins can be lost in the written form I use Glosbe online for general vocabulary. DeepL might better for converting texts but that's not all that a student wants to understand I don't know how KZbin works but I find that the autogenerated option for Hungarian subtitles is only sporadically. If only more content creators included subtitles, the practice material would increase exponentially. I am surprised that national media doesn't routinely include subtitles for the deaf and hearing impaired

[@feszoj]

Thanks, I am learning Hungarian several years ago, I am Peruvian, son of Hungarian. And I really can not speak fluently yet.

[@HungarianKiwiNZ]

Yes, speaking is probably the hardest aspect. This is when you need that active vocabulary on tap - without having to translate. If you are like me, you speak then hear what you said and want to correct your grammar and by then the person you are talking to is responding and you need to attend to that.