Hey folks!

I have finally decided to enter one of the medical faculties (Budapest, Pécs, Széged) in Hungary offering the studies in German language. I haven't decided on any of those yet, but the later two ones seem to be very nice looking locations!

Life in Hungary seems to be a lot easier by knowing at least basic Hungarian I've heard from enrolled students who were desperate finding an apartment in their city. Therefore I decided learning a bit of Hungarian (still 6 months left until the actual study starts, so I hope to make some progress at least vocabulary wise in Anki).

I thought it'd be nice learning Hungarian in Japanese by the way. I don't know anything about Hungarian. A lot of forums say it is a language that is very difficult to learn as it has no connections to Latin, English or German ("isolated" language).. To be honest, this is a bit frightening to me, but yet exciting as I feel Hungarian sounds very interesting!
Is there anything I should keep in mind when starting to srs vocabulary? Genera (masculine/feminine/neutrum?) or singular/plural irregularities??

Please feel free to contact me (e-mail) if you know anything about the universities or have any suggestions for decks I could use or if you are just a native/experienced Hungarian learner.

Looking forward to hearing from you all!

Congrats with your offer [given that you've got one].

The biggest problem I find with German is getting the genders (and cases) right, so finding a trick to learn words with their genders is probably a good start.

Viel Glück dabei!

[Zgarbas]

I never even managed to get past basic phonetics with Hungarian. I say something, they look at me funny, I state what i was trying to say, they go "aaaaah, i see!" and tell me the exact thing I said (at least it sounds like that to me), I sigh and reconcile to the fact that I will never, ever, understand Hungarian. You'd think hearing it on a regular basis for years would help, but nooo. Hungarian isn't an isolated language per se, but it is Fino-Ugric and thus not Indo-European. I'd heavily focus on phonetics before doing anything else.

That being said, Hungarians speak German. You'll find it easier to talk to people than an English speaker. Just look up touchy subjects* before talking to anyone. It's a weird time.

*Seriously. Never bring them up. And if someone else does just smile and nod.

Hey Tori-kun,

I live in Pécs. A couple of months ago I remember we've exhanged some posts on these forums about this very topic. I'm not saying, that I'm ready to answer any questions you have, but I think I can help you.

Firstly, since you are German (at least I suppose so), I think this would be one of the best methods for Hungarian: http://www.assimil.de/sprachkurs/ungarisch.htm
You can order it from the German amazon as well: http://www.amazon.de/ASSiMiL-Selbstlernk...2700501802
Be sure to order it with the recordings (CD or MP3)!

Secondly, your English is flawless - as far as I can see - so I think that you'd be able to learn from English-based materials. http://fsi.antibozo.net/files/courses/Hungarian/
(the fsi-language-courses.org website was mysteriously removed from the Internet in January, so this is only a mirror).
edit: the text for the Hungarian courses can be found here: http://fsi.antibozo.net/files/other/
Use Ctrl+F to find them!

Thirdly, if I remember well, University of Pécs offers Hungarian courses for prospective students.

And finally, don't be afraid of Hungarian! With your knowledge of Japanese, I'm sure that you'll be able to wrap your head around the (agglutinating) grammar of this language! Actually, Hungarian is more related to Japanese, than to Indoeuropean-languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ural%E2%80%..._languages

There are no genders in Hungarian.

If you any more questions, feel free to ask!

@Stian: I am a native German and as my girlfriend is learning German I can prove what you're saying is right. Whereas she would understand anything perfectly fine, both spoken language and written texts, when it comes to production she struggles a lot with getting the genders and cases right.

Secondly, I do not know if I will get accept or not at any of the listed universities, but at least I want to try applying and see what might happen next.

@Zgarbas: I could judge from the news easily that it is "wierd times" in Hungary right now. But nevertheless, I would be grateful to hear more about your experiences and about the said touchy topics. I could imagine what you mean, but please feel free to mail me directly. This thread shouldn't get derailed and is not supposed to contain these information.

@Solaron: Oh yes, I remember! You seem to be more of an active lurker and it's good to know you are still on the boards.

On the 19.05.2013 there will be an open day of the University of Szeged (thanks to your pdf I know how to pronounce the name of the town correctly now. Indeed, my original pronounciation was ways off lol) and I will be flying to Budapest and taking the train to Szeged. I'm excited to experience Hungarian railway!

Thanks for the links. I think I will definitely pay more attention to pronounciation and audio while learning Hungarian. The Assimil course might be worth looking into. I like the pdf you've send me. I can at least say "good morning" now.

Still, I'm craving Japanese ressources. I really want to learn my L5 in my L4 following the ladder system, so I need something in Japanese to learn Hungarian.

I will write you an email so please check your postbox as it might be very well possible I will be texting you more often.

@Tori-kun

I've got your mail, I will contact you shortly.

@Zgarbas

I fail to see why are these times any weirder than they were ever been. I don't think Hungary has such problems which are distinct from those that any European country has nowadays. I think our country is just yet another spacegoat that the media of the richer countries can use for diverting the attention of their population from their own, inner pressing issues.
But maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. I just want to emphasize that please don't demonize neither the people, neither the current leadership. There were much, much worse periods in our (recent) history.
Anyway, your advice atually stands true, it's not wise to talk about politics with anyone, before you can pin point his/her orientation with absolute precision based on cues hinted here and there.

[Zgarbas]

=) I apologize if it came out wrong. I didn't mean to be offensive, but there are certain topics which are best avoided in any culture, and I think it is best to see which they are before moving to a country. Also, Hungary aside, it can be a bit weird for any Westerner to move to a country which used to be in the Eastern Bloc.
However, from personal experience, discussing a touchy subject in Hungary can be a bit more costly than in other places. Of course, many people would gladly discuss normally, but with the rise in extremists lately I think it's best to be cautious. Just my two cents.

(That being said, I've only ever heard good things about Pecs. Been meaning to visit for years)

That's me now.. I watched an episode of Tatort on Monday, and my comprehension was about 97-ish % (or perhaps more) ... but my output is just terribad.

May I ask what your L3 is? (assuming English is your 2nd).
Also, I saw that you posted about struggling with Japanese listening a few days ago (forgive me if I'm mistaken), so perhaps you should focus more on listening (both in~ and comprehensive) this time around?

You should also consider asking around on HTLAL. There isn't the large amount of unconditional love of pre-made decks (or anki in general for that matter) but still, there are loads of people learning various languages there, so you might be more likely to find more advice there.

Yes, Hungarian is an "isolated" language, but it does have plenty of Latin, Greek, French, English, German, etc. import-words, because Hungarians have spent the last 1000 years smack in the middle of Europe. It's also an agglutinative language like Japanese (and a little bit like German).

I speak Hungarian, and I find that that also helps me with Japanese grammar more than English and other Latin languages I speak.

Phonetics, I suppose, can be an issue for some. But it's not THAT difficult. Hungarian has a 44 letter alphabet. Most of them are the well known Latin letters. There are a few that are written with two consonants (Zs, sz, dzs, ty, etc.), but every single one of these is a sound that's also in either German or Japanese. Then there are a few so called "long" vowels, but every single one of these sounds is also common in English (an example would be Í, which is pronounced exactly like the ea in "speak"). There are also a couple of vowels many people have touble with (Ö and Ü), but they're both very common in French (first sounds like the vowel in Je, the second like the U in "une fille"-this second one is common in Japanese as well).

And that's it. Just like Japanese, Hungarian is pronounced exactly as written. Learn the 44 sounds, and you're good. It's much easier than English.

P.S. Hungary is a peaceful, safe, multicultural European nation. They have douchebags, like everyone else (including Germany), but the douchebags are kept well in check, and never get passed the point of empty, headline grabbing rhetoric. There is absolutely no reason to fear either going to Hungary, or talking just as freely about ANY SUBJECT YOU WISH TO TALK ABOUT when there, as you would in Germany.

Tori-kun Wrote:A lot of forums say it is a language that is very difficult to learn as it has no connections to Latin, English or German ("isolated" language)..

Just to be clear, you are using the word "isolated" to suggest that it is unrelated to the languages surrounding it and to the major languages of Western Europe, and not to imply that it is what is referred to in linguistics as a language isolate? Because, as far as historical linguistics is concerned, it certainly isn't the latter, even if Hungarian nationalists object to mainstream linguists' classification (and even they usually try to connect it to other languages and language families, like Turkic or Sumerian, rather than insist on its isolate status). There are even theories linking it to Japanese, e.g. the Ural-Altaic proposal, but I don't think they are taken seriously these days. Either way, wrapping your head around Hungarian grammar shouldn't be too hard after Japanese.

@Stian: English is far away from being an L2 of mine haha Russian and German are kind of my L1/L2 (both mothertongues), so English is L3 and Japanese L4. (I don't count Latin in here because I cannot use it actively)

@vonPeterhof: I apologise for the linguistic inaccuracy. I wonder how similiar the grammar really is.

@Stansfield123: Are you a native Hungarian or how did you get to learn Hungarian? Just asking out of curiosity

Goddamn 鳥君, four languages!? You're amazing.

Based on my experience with learning Hungarian I can say the following:

Hungarian has tons of loanwords and direct translations from German (e.g. vekker = Wecker, feladni = aufgeben), and on top of that a lot of Slavic loanwords (which did help me a bit).

Achieving fluency (or near-fluency) takes roughly the same amount of effort and time as in case of English or German. Yes, it is very different from IE languages, but there again the IE languages are so different from each other that it doesn't make too much of a difference. And of course it's much, much easier than Japanese. I would also argue that English pronunciation is harder to master than Hungarian, though not by much.

On the other hand, the difficulty curve is pretty much inverted in comparison with English, which is quite easy and friendly for the beginner, but an leprechaun to an advanced learner - around the intermediate level it starts throwing at you loads of sesquipedalian words of obscure Latin or Greek or Old French origin that have to be memorized due to their relatively widespread usage in literature and more sophisticated magazines, and there are some 3-5 synonyms for every concept. You either learn all that crap or never become fluent.

Hungarian is very unwelcoming at first. The grammar system is moderately complicated (much less complicated and exception-ridden than that of the Slavic languages), yet it sort of requires you to assume a completely different way of thinking about how a language works... not sure if I'm making myself clear, I mean it's harder to get used to the grammar than to learn it, and it's off-putting to many. E.g. Hungarian cases have almost nothing to do (apart from the name) with the cases in IE languages. Secondly, the lack of similarity to any language you know does create a severe burden on memory in the first stage (6-12 months). That's the time in which a great deal of learners give up and spend the rest of their lives telling everyone how unlearnable the language is (which is quite the opposite of the reaction to fail Japanese learners have - even if they managed to learn no more than watashi and neko - yep, in romaji - many of them will brag about their Japanese skills whenever possible). But when you get past this first and worst phase, you'll see how logically structured Hungarian is. Words for more complicated concepts are made up of words for less complicated concepts - not an original invention, but Hungarian makes use of it much, much more often than IE languages. This makes the vocab more and more easy to remember with every stage.

I guess it's all bad news if you just want to learn the basics... those are the hardest. But cheer up - when those are learned thoroughly, the jump to reading original literature and conversing about non-trivial topics is by orders of magnitude easier than e.g. in English.

Oh, did I forget to mention how beautiful it is? Maybe next time.

BrianG Wrote:Hungarian cases have almost nothing to do (apart from the name) with the cases in IE languages.

Would you say that they have more similarities with Japanese particles? That has been, to some extent, my experience in Kazakh. In the example I gave in an old thread the Kazakh morpheme мен is used in the same ways as the Japanese particle と, but in the first example it is treated as an equivalent of the IE instrumental case, while in the second one it is treated as a conjunction with the same function as the word "and". This might have something to do with the philologists who designed the language's orthography and wrote its official grammar coming from an IE-centric (or, more specifically, Russocentric) standpoint.

vonPeterhof Wrote:Just to be clear, you are using the word "isolated" to suggest that it is unrelated to the languages surrounding it and to the major languages of Western Europe, and not to imply that it is what is referred to in linguistics as a language isolate? Because, as far as historical linguistics is concerned, it certainly isn't the latter, even if Hungarian nationalists object to mainstream linguists' classification (and even they usually try to connect it to other languages and language families, like Turkic or Sumerian, rather than insist on its isolate status). There are even theories linking it to Japanese, e.g. the Ural-Altaic proposal, but I don't think they are taken seriously these days. Either way, wrapping your head around Hungarian grammar shouldn't be too hard after Japanese.

I wasn't aware that there was any controversy about the Hungarian language. I certainly know of no "Hungarian extremists" who are denying that Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric (Uralic) language. It's been an established fact since 100+ years. The previous (early 19th century) theory was that it was related to German. No one believes that anymore. I know of no other claims.

However, except maybe for Finnish and Estonian, I don't think anyone on this forum has ever heard any other Uralic language spoken, let alone is able to speak it.

BrianG Wrote:Based on my experience with learning Hungarian I can say the following:

Hungarian has tons of loanwords and direct translations from German (e.g. vekker = Wecker, feladni = aufgeben), and on top of that a lot of Slavic loanwords (which did help me a bit).

Achieving fluency (or near-fluency) takes roughly the same amount of effort and time as in case of English or German. Yes, it is very different from IE languages, but there again the IE languages are so different from each other that it doesn't make too much of a difference. And of course it's much, much easier than Japanese. I would also argue that English pronunciation is harder to master than Hungarian, though not by much.

On the other hand, the difficulty curve is pretty much inverted in comparison with English, which is quite easy and friendly for the beginner, but an leprechaun to an advanced learner - around the intermediate level it starts throwing at you loads of sesquipedalian words of obscure Latin or Greek or Old French origin that have to be memorized due to their relatively widespread usage in literature and more sophisticated magazines, and there are some 3-5 synonyms for every concept. You either learn all that crap or never become fluent.

Hungarian is very unwelcoming at first. The grammar system is moderately complicated (much less complicated and exception-ridden than that of the Slavic languages), yet it sort of requires you to assume a completely different way of thinking about how a language works... not sure if I'm making myself clear, I mean it's harder to get used to the grammar than to learn it, and it's off-putting to many. E.g. Hungarian cases have almost nothing to do (apart from the name) with the cases in IE languages. Secondly, the lack of similarity to any language you know does create a severe burden on memory in the first stage (6-12 months). That's the time in which a great deal of learners give up and spend the rest of their lives telling everyone how unlearnable the language is (which is quite the opposite of the reaction to fail Japanese learners have - even if they managed to learn no more than watashi and neko - yep, in romaji - many of them will brag about their Japanese skills whenever possible). But when you get past this first and worst phase, you'll see how logically structured Hungarian is. Words for more complicated concepts are made up of words for less complicated concepts - not an original invention, but Hungarian makes use of it much, much more often than IE languages. This makes the vocab more and more easy to remember with every stage.

I guess it's all bad news if you just want to learn the basics... those are the hardest. But cheer up - when those are learned thoroughly, the jump to reading original literature and conversing about non-trivial topics is by orders of magnitude easier than e.g. in English.

Oh, did I forget to mention how beautiful it is? Maybe next time.

Completely agree. Except for vekker: having spoken Hungarian all my life, and having read hundreds of books in Hungarian, I never heard of vekker. But it does exist, I looked it up I guess it's a "wake-er" (alarm clock). See, this Hungarian business is easy.

Quote:@Stansfield123: Are you a native Hungarian or how did you get to learn Hungarian? Just asking out of curiosity

I'm ethnic Hungarian, but never lived there. Don't even have a Hungarian passport (though I'm gonna get one, might come in handy). (fun fact: if you speak Hungarian, they will probably give you a passport). And I'm definitely not a nationalist. I despise nationalists, even the innocent "let's all be proud of our X or Y heritage types, let alone the "let's round up all the Jews" types.

Stansfield123 Wrote:

vonPeterhof Wrote:Just to be clear, you are using the word "isolated" to suggest that it is unrelated to the languages surrounding it and to the major languages of Western Europe, and not to imply that it is what is referred to in linguistics as a language isolate? Because, as far as historical linguistics is concerned, it certainly isn't the latter, even if Hungarian nationalists object to mainstream linguists' classification (and even they usually try to connect it to other languages and language families, like Turkic or Sumerian, rather than insist on its isolate status). There are even theories linking it to Japanese, e.g. the Ural-Altaic proposal, but I don't think they are taken seriously these days. Either way, wrapping your head around Hungarian grammar shouldn't be too hard after Japanese.

I wasn't aware that there was any controversy about the Hungarian language. I certainly know of no "Hungarian extremists" who are denying that Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric (Uralic) language. It's been an established fact since 100+ years. The previous (early 19th century) theory was that it was related to German. No one believes that anymore. I know of no other claims.

However, except maybe for Finnish and Estonian, I don't think anyone on this forum has ever heard any other Uralic language spoken, let alone is able to speak it.

People denying the existence of Uralic and/or Finno-Ugric show up from time to time on the discussion pages of the Wikipedia articles on these language families, and they pretty much always turn out to be Hungarian. One editor, going by the handle "Antifinnugor", flamed in the "Finno-Ugric languages" discussion page so much he was banned from the article (on more than one occasion, IIRC). However, I wasn't sure how widespread those views were among Hungarians, so thanks for clearing that up. It also seems to me that even if most Hungarians aren't outright denying the connection, they seem to be less enthusiastic about it than, say, Finns and Estonians. From intergovernmental efforts to revitalize dying Uralic languages here in Russia to trivial things like Eurovision votes, it appears that Finns and Estonians are at least paying lip-service to the whole "Finno-Ugric kinship" thing, whereas Hungarians are just sort of "meh" about it.

I'm not sure what you were getting at in the second paragraph, but Udmurt also got a little exposure recently via Russia's delegation to the 2012 Eurovision. Although I suspect that most people watching were more focussed on the novelty of an ethno-pop act by elderly ladies from the middle of nowhere than on what language their song was sung in. Also, there seems to be a fair number of Norwegians on this forum, and they might have also heard at least snippets of some of the Sami languages.

I'm sure there are people on wikipedia who think we've all descended from aliens, too. There are people out there who deny every single piece of established science you can find. But these are just dumb people who live in a fantasy world, no one would take them seriously. There are no serious, or even semi-serious, challenges to the established science on the origin of Hungarian.

vonPeterhof Wrote:It also seems to me that even if most Hungarians aren't outright denying the connection, they seem to be less enthusiastic about it than, say, Finns and Estonians. From intergovernmental efforts to revitalize dying Uralic languages here in Russia to trivial things like Eurovision votes, it appears that Finns and Estonians are at least paying lip-service to the whole "Finno-Ugric kinship" thing, whereas Hungarians are just sort of "meh" about it.

Well, the fact is it doesn't matter, it's entirely incidental what language Hungarian is loosely related to. So the right attitude would be to go "meh". Ethnically/genetically, Finns and Hungarians are probably more related to the French, Germans, Slavs etc., than some old tribe in Asia. Not that that makes a difference either.

If you're right, and Hungary isn't wasting money on an incidental association with some tribe in Asia, good for them. But I fear that you're wrong. Knowing a little about European politics, they never let an opportunity to aimlessly spend money go to waste. I'm sure Hungary is pouring taxpayer money down the drain, just like Finland and Estonia, on this. Just less of it, since they have less to begin with.

Stansfield123 Wrote:Well, the fact is it doesn't matter, it's entirely incidental what language Hungarian is loosely related to. So the right attitude would be to go "meh". Ethnically/genetically, Finns and Hungarians are probably more related to the French, Germans, Slavs etc., than some old tribe in Asia. Not that that makes a difference either.

If you're right, and Hungary isn't wasting money on an incidental association with some tribe in Asia, good for them. But I fear that you're wrong. Knowing a little about European politics, they never let an opportunity to aimlessly spend money go to waste. I'm sure Hungary is pouring taxpayer money down the drain, just like Finland and Estonia, on this. Just less of it, since they have less to begin with.

Judging by these pages you're right, although this one seems to have more to do with general economic cooperation and cultural exchange than specifically with language revitalization.

And, in case my wording gave that impression, I wasn't praising the attitudes of Finns and Estonians or criticizing the Hungarian attitude. As someone with an interest in historical linguistics I keep coming across people using both legitimate linguistics and racialist ethno-linguistic BS in support of various political agendas, so I'm all for the "meh" attitude. I just find the situation somewhat curious.

Although I have heard suggestions that the initial lack of enthusiasm from Hungarians, when the Finno-Ugric family was first proposed, came from a less pragmatic attitude - namely that the Hungarian nationalists didn't like the insinuation that they, descendants of nomadic conquerors and the creators of one of Europe's oldest kingdoms, were most closely related to peaceful woodland tribes from the outskirts of the Russian Empire (which included both Finland and Estonia at the time). That attitude may have led a subset of those nationalists to embrace Turanism as an alternative, with its connections to conquering Turkic tribes, Mongols, and others. (Oh and the fact that the list of proposed relations includes both Koreans and Japanese is hilarious if you consider these reactions of modern day internet xenophobes)

Hi, Hungarian native here.

I think our language and German have quite a few things in common. Not grammatically but certain phrases follow the same logic. Agglutination is rather different from Japanese but it could be useful to know the concept. It is said that the most difficult aspects of Hungarian are definite and indefinite verb conjugations (i.e. the conjugation is different if the verb has an object in the sentence).

Anyway, good luck and feel free to ask me any questions either about the language or about Hungary in general in PM any time.

EDIT: I've graduated from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics not that long ago so I might be able to answer your questions about Hungarian higher education, too.

gombost, I sent you a PM