Learning Hungarian in an hour
17 Nov 2023In 2007 I wrote a post “Learning Bulgarian in an Hour” based on this article: How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour. Let’s see how that works out with Hungarian.
Introduction
Disclaimer: my wife is Hungarian, I have had a lot of exposure to it, and somehow almost none of it stuck with me. I’m normally not that bad with languages. So it’s their fault, not mine. Will I get chewed out for this article? Probably.
“Isn’t Hungarian, like, a slavic language?” (I get this question every now and then). Oh my, do I have news for you. Hungarian is a language isolate, meaning it has no known relatives. It is not related to any other language in Europe, and is one of the few languages in the world that is not part of the Indo-European family. It is spoken by about 10 million people in Hungary and by an additional 3 million people in other countries, including Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, and Austria.
Hungarians have been using the roman alphabet since 1000AD, before that it was written in rovásírás - Hungarian runes . Their alphabet is 44 characters, 14 of which are vowels. That sounds like a lot, but part of it is that they strive for a phonetic language. E.g. if the ‘o’ in “pot” sounds different from the ‘o’ in “boot”, then it should be written differently. They’re very peculiar about their ‘s’ sounds: there’s s, sz, zs, cs and dzs.
Difficulty
Hungarian prides itself in being one of the most difficult languages on the continent. The Polish might disagree, but then, don’t they always. Let’s see how it scores on the 4 criteria:
- Are there new grammatical structures that will postpone fluency? (look at Subject-Object-Verb vs. Subject-Verb-Object, as well as noun cases)
There is no classical SOV or SVO. The Verb often leads (let’s call it VSO), the object gets suffixes to indicate position, direction or possession. Most importantly, there is no gender. “His car/Her car”, “to him/to her”, it’s all the same. - Are there new sounds that will double or quadruple time to fluency? (especially vowels)
It is written phonetically, but not in the same way a german or roman language speaker would use the language. E.g. ‘s’ is pronounced ‘sh’ like in ‘shaman’, while ‘sz’ is the sound that we normally associate with s. - How similar is it to languages I already understand? What will help and what will interfere? (Will acquisition erase a previous language? Can I borrow structures without fatal interference like Portuguese after Spanish?)
You’re on your own here. It’s not related to any other language in Europe. They had a joint empire with the Austrians for a while, yet almost no German words were adopted into the language. - All of which answer: How difficult will it be, and how long would it take to become functionally fluent?
I’m going to say: at least 10.000 hours.
Language structure
Let’s take these 9 sentences that clarify a lot about how the language works:
| English | Hungarian |
|---|---|
| The apple is red | A alma piros |
| It is John’s apple | Ez János alma |
| I give John the apple | Odaadom Johnnak az almát |
| We give him the apple | Adjuk neki az almát |
| He gives it to John | Johnnak adja |
| She gives it to him | Odaadja neki |
| I must give it to him | Oda kell adnom neki |
| I want to give it to her | Oda akarom adni neki |
| I give John the red apple | Odaadom Johnnak a piros almát |
Helping verbs
And the verbs for easy auxiliary usage are:
| English | Hungarian |
|---|---|
| I want, you want | akarok, akarsz |
| I can, you can | tudok, tudsz |
| I have to, you have to | kell, kell |
| I love to, you love to | szeretek, szeretsz |
| I must, you must | muszáj, muszáj |
| I should, you should | kéne, kéne |
| I will, you will | fogok, fogsz |
| I would, you would | akarnék, akarnál |
Sounds and scripts
Hungarian uses ⟨s⟩ for /ʃ/ and ⟨sz⟩ for /s/, which is the reverse of Polish usage. The letter ⟨zs⟩ is /ʒ/ and ⟨cs⟩ is /t͡ʃ/. The letter ⟨c⟩ is pronounced /t͡s/ before ⟨e⟩ and ⟨i⟩, and /k/ elsewhere. The letter ⟨y⟩ is used only in foreign words, and is pronounced /i/ or /j/ depending on context. The letter ⟨z⟩ is pronounced /z/ before ⟨a⟩, ⟨á⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨ó⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨ú⟩, and /s/ elsewhere. The letter ⟨r⟩ is pronounced /r/ before ⟨a⟩, ⟨á⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨ó⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨ú⟩, and /ɾ/ elsewhere. The letter ⟨ny⟩ is pronounced /ɲ/ and ⟨ly⟩ is pronounced /j/ before ⟨e⟩ and ⟨i⟩, and /ɲ/ elsewhere. The letter ⟨gy⟩ is pronounced /ɟ/ before ⟨e⟩ and ⟨i⟩, and /ɡ/ elsewhere. The letter ⟨h⟩ is pronounced /h/ before ⟨a⟩, ⟨á⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨ó⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨ú⟩, and /ɦ/ elsewhere. The letter ⟨v⟩ is pronounced /v/ before ⟨a⟩, ⟨á⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨ó⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨ú⟩, and /f/ elsewhere. The letter ⟨j⟩ is pronounced /j/ before ⟨a⟩, ⟨á⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨ó⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨ú⟩, and /j/ elsewhere. The letter ⟨l⟩ is pronounced /l/ before ⟨a⟩, ⟨á⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨ó⟩, ⟨u⟩, ⟨ú⟩, and /w/ elsewhere. The letter ⟨í⟩ is pronounced /iː/ and ⟨e⟩ is pronounced /ɛ/ before ⟨r⟩, ⟨l⟩, ⟨j⟩, ⟨v⟩, ⟨z⟩, ⟨s⟩, ⟨sz⟩, ⟨zs⟩, ⟨c⟩, ⟨cs⟩, ⟨dz⟩, ⟨dzs⟩, ⟨ty⟩, ⟨gy⟩, ⟨ny⟩, ⟨ly⟩, ⟨h⟩, ⟨n⟩, ⟨m⟩, ⟨p⟩, ⟨b⟩, ⟨f⟩, ⟨g⟩, ⟨k⟩, ⟨t⟩, ⟨d⟩, ⟨r⟩, ⟨l⟩
You still there?
Conclusion
What this tells me, is that it would be interesting to build a language evaluator for all languages, that would use a limited number of key sentences to deduce usage of gender, plurals, suffixes, time, etc. and then give a score for the difficulty of the language.
