Verovali ili ne - jedan poliglota iz Irske koji govori 10 jezika smatra da madjarski jezik jeste lak.
http://www.fluentin3months.com/hungarian-is-easy/
Why Hungarian is easy
I’m sure the title of this post will have many people doing a double take, but yes you read that right; Hungarian is easy.
Hungarian is not an Indo-European language (i.e. Hindi actually has more in common with English/French/German/Russian etc. than Hungarian does), so it’s very different to all of its neighbours and this gives it the reputation of being among the most challenging languages in the world.
And yes, it can be “hard”. But not because a bunch of people say it is; it only matters what you think if you are taking on the language yourself. There is no such thing as a hardest language, only a “hard” attitude. If you have your filter set to pessimist then you can find many reasons why Hungarian or Spanish or French is “impossible” to learn.
But the way I managed to be able to speak Hungarian in just two months was doing the exact opposite. Much to the frustration of people who I met, who were convinced Hungarian was the hardest language in the world, I would cheerily maintain how ridiculously easy my task was.
This approach meant I had no mental barriers, no nagging doubts in my head, no fears to just say something and make mistakes, I just spoke and let the progress flow enough for me to be able to have genuine friendships entirely through Hungarian.
But rather than repeating an empty mantra of “Hungarian is easy” over and over again, I was genuinely looking for actual aspects of the language that would support this mentality and I am going to share these findings with you in this post in the hopes that other Hungarian learners will ignore the unhelpful discouragement from other learners and even from natives. The time for excuses is over!
Of course, I’ve done exactly the same thing for Czech and even wrote a whole book about Why German is easy along the same lines.
Best way to learn it?
If you’re new to this blog you might not have seen me say quite frequently that the best way to gain fluency in any language is to speak it right away. Hungarian does not earn an exception to this rule and get granted the “wait until you’re ready” card.
If you live in Hungary, stop hanging out exclusively with expats and if you would like to get into it from abroad, you should realize that there are thousands of Hungarians signed into language exchange sites frustrated that nobody wants to practise their language with them, just a free Skype call away. Seriously.
Get into speaking it now and have a human being guide you through the feeling of the language! Otherwise you can find podcasts and streamed radio in Hungarian, look up words you don’t know on the free online dictionary Sztaki, and read countless websites and books in the language. One cool blog for example is Öt év – öt nyelv (5 years, 5 languages) run by my friend Bálint, who also translated the Language Hacking Guide entirely to Hungarian (which is part of the multilingual download) for people to use as reading practice.
Otherwise you can use traditional study tools, but don’t dwell too much on these. For books I found Hungarian – an essential grammar to be a useful very technical explanation of the language (not for the faint hearted; unlike most courses there are no pretty pictures or dialogues; it’s pure grammar but explained well) and Colloquial Hungarian is a more natural way to ease into the language with lots of examples in context, and learning essential vocabulary in the right order. I also like to learn via another language and quite enjoyed Assimil’s Le Hongrois de poche in French.
Grammar
1. CASES
One of the first things you will hear when someone is describing Hungarian to you is that it has “over twenty cases” (exact number depends on the source). This is pure hogwash.
From learning a Slavic language (Czech) and German, I have a pretty good idea what a grammatical case is; Genitive, Accusative, Dative, Vocative etc. and while I have my ways of getting through these (described in the Czech/German guides linked above), they are still quite a lot of work and will slow you down when you are learning a language.
Hungarian’s “cases” are nothing like these. There is almost no complexity to them at all! It’s just a fancy name for “the preposition gets attached to the end of the word”. So while in Czech, any case requires you to know (or at least extrapolate) up to fourteen possible combinations per word (which luckily follow patterns) for each case, Hungarian just has two or three, which are almost always totally obvious.
Seriously; they are just prepositions! You could call it the “dative”, but it’s actually the “to/for”. So in German’s dative you’d need to have the article (dem, der, dem) agree in gender, then modify the adjective ending, and then sometimes get the right ending on the noun, in Hungarian you just add “-nek” or “-nak” to the end. Which one you use only depends on the vowels in the word.
So Csillának adtam egy könyvet is I gave a book to Csilla. “In” Budapest is written as Budapesten. These “cases” don’t influence articles or adjectives and are a short list to learn, which you’d have to learn anyway in other languages as prepositions.
It takes some getting used to when you attach them to the end of the word rather than the beginning, and the only other trick is that if you use a demonstrative (“this” or “that”) it also gets attached to the word this/that. But that’s about it!
(Possessives work in almost the same way; my/your/his etc. get attached to the end of the word instead of before it.)
Stop thinking of them as cases, and just think of them as fancy prepositions and you’ll do fine. They aren’t even that fancy. Think of things like “with John” as “John with” and the challenge suddenly starts to disappear.
Verdict: easy
2. PHONETICS
Hungarian is an almost perfectly phonetic language.
It takes some getting used to that Sz represents the “s” sound and S alone represents the “sh” sound, the “c” sound is “ts” like in cats (Esperanto and Slavic languages do this too) and “cs” is “ch” (like chair), j is pronounced as “y”, zs is the French j sound like the s in pleasure, the ö and ü (and corresponding longer versions) are different vowel sounds and the famous gy in the language name itself, magyar is also something we don’t directly have in English, but can be pretty accurately approximated by “dy” and “ly” is pronounced as if it was just “y”. The r is rolled like in Spanish.
That’s pretty summarises the most important differences.
Other parts of the phonetics are very straightforward and not strange at all, so you can spell a word when you hear it spoken and pronounce it when you see it written for the first time (unlike in English). Learn the above differences and you’ll do fine. It may seem complicated, but pronouncing based on spelling in French for example is way more complicated.
Verdict: easy
3. CONJUGATIONS
This follows a very European style of 1st, 2nd, 3rd person singular and then 1st, 2nd, 3rd person plural and strangely enough seems very similar to Spanish or Italian in a lot of ways.
For example, speak is “beszél”, but you speak is “beszélsz” (remember, sz is pronounced “s”), like Spanish’s hablar–> hablas. Because they aren’t actually related, similarities are more coincidental, but they aren’t that far off.
The absolute easiest part of Hungarian conjugation is the fact that it is basically based around just three verb tenses; past, present, future. Any other European language will have past perfect, pluperfect, etc. but it’s more straightforward in Hungarian. All conjugations are very consistent and there are way less irregular verbs than there are in many other languages.
The one thing that does indeed take some getting used to is separating the definite and indefinite conjugation, which doesn’t exist in other European languages. While this is indeed tricky to get used to, the basic premise isn’t that complicated (does the object in the sentence have an “a” or a “the” is the basic question you need to ask yourself), and even if you mess up while you are learning, Hungarians will always understand you.
Like in any language, you are required to study a few tables to get the gist of how conjugations work, but I find the complexities in Spanish’s conjugation to be much more diverse and found Hungarian’s to be very logical and predictable, even after taking “exceptions” into account.
Verdict: easy
4. NOUN GENDERS
Oh sorry, Hungarian doesn’t have grammatical genders. So there are no extra ways to learn how to say “the”, no adjective or case agreement to worry about and no memory techniques required to make sure you aren’t using the wrong one.
Verdict: way too easy
5. PLURALS
Hungarian is pretty much as good as English here! English uses ‘s’ (dogs), Hungarian uses ‘k’ (kutyák). If the noun ends in a vowel then it gets an accent and if it’s a possessive, it becomes an i before the ending possessive letter. That’s about it.
Verdict: Child’s play