turorudi Triglot Newbie Philippines Joined 3513 days ago 24 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English, Tagalog*, Japanese Studies: Hungarian, French
| Message 1 of 9 16 March 2015 at 10:31am | IP Logged |
Sziasztok! Hello everyone!
A bit about me
A nevem Cat. I just joined the forum and I would like to track my progress in my 2015
language challenge. I want to learn Hungarian after being exposed to it last year. I
love the sound even if I could not understand any of it. Then I began to love the
country, its culture and history. The people are very warm too. My boyfriend is
Hungarian and I hope to visit him and his family in August of this year. Now I have
more motivation to learn this beautiful language. I would love to connect with native
Hungarian speakers and learners through this forum.
Mission
B1 level (minimum) in Hungarian by end of 2015
Materials and Resources
Assimil
Complete Hungarian (Pontifex)
Colloquial Hungarian
HungarianPod101.com
Pimsleur
FSI
Memrise
italki tutoring with professional and informal tutors
chats with native speakers via italki and gospeaky
Duolingo - as soon as the Hungarian course is finished (delayed for April)
Edited by turorudi on 16 March 2015 at 10:32am
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tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3991 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch
| Message 2 of 9 16 March 2015 at 11:40am | IP Logged |
Good luck!
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jmagyar Triglot Newbie SlovakiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5321 days ago 16 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Slovak, Hungarian*, English Studies: German
| Message 3 of 9 16 March 2015 at 11:44am | IP Logged |
Hello and good luck to your Hungarian studies. I haven't yet read anyone's opinion who's
learning Hungarian so I'm sure I will read your log. I hope you will have a lot of fun
and you will reach your goal this year.
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Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4088 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog
| Message 4 of 9 16 March 2015 at 4:35pm | IP Logged |
Hello Cat! Kumusta ka na? Nice to "see" you in another part of the interwebs! I look forward to following along with
your Hungarian log.
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turorudi Triglot Newbie Philippines Joined 3513 days ago 24 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English, Tagalog*, Japanese Studies: Hungarian, French
| Message 5 of 9 17 March 2015 at 5:49am | IP Logged |
@tristano: Thank you! :)
@Stelle: Nice to see you too!
@jmagyar: köszönöm szépen! yes, I am having fun. I am in the early stages yet so I don't
know a lot -- but one thing is for sure: my Hungarian circle of friends has grown a lot
bigger. I have over 10 now. I mean, wow -- how's that for learning partners and support?
:)
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turorudi Triglot Newbie Philippines Joined 3513 days ago 24 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English, Tagalog*, Japanese Studies: Hungarian, French
| Message 6 of 9 19 March 2015 at 3:25am | IP Logged |
I haven't written down a summary of my 3rd week on my blog. Here is what I have so
far. It may not look a lot but what I did not mention in the first post of this log is
that I am also studying for a proficiency exam in Japanese. I track my Japanese
progress too but just on my blog.
Anyway...I've been dabbling in Hungarian since last year but it was only in February
of this year that I've started to study seriously - with a battle plan and all ;)
SUMMARY:
Week 1: 1 March
I had good progress with reinforcing material from FSI and Assimil because of the
Memrise streak challenge. But the bulk of work is an hour's study using my main
materials. This week, I focused on Hungarian Pod (still on the Absolute Beginner
level) and Pimsleur.
I also had 2 italki sessions. One is a one hour session with a professional tutor who
really explains grammar very well. The other one is a 30-minute session with an
informal tutor who helps me practice conversation.
The first session was really tough. I did not expect to talk about the plot of the 3rd
Taken movie :P I mean, at my level, I didn't think I needed to learn the Hungarian
equivalents for "die", "suspect", "arrest" and others. But it was fun :D
The second session was a bit more chill as we talked about hobbies and interests like
sports and music. The kinds of things that my language/chat partners always ask me.
Now I know how to say "I don't like Twilight".
Week 2: 8 March
I have problems with verbs. Well, actually Hungarian words in general. While there are
loan words from English like tévé and rádio, these are very few. It takes me a while
to memorize things like számítógép.
But on the positive side, I don't feel like I needed to memorize conjugation tables
and rules. In my lessons, we keep on repeating the same stuff and things like the
definite and indefinite conjugations, the plural and accusative forms seem to come
naturally now. It is still not 100% correct but it's progress.
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jmagyar Triglot Newbie SlovakiaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5321 days ago 16 posts - 21 votes Speaks: Slovak, Hungarian*, English Studies: German
| Message 7 of 9 19 March 2015 at 10:02am | IP Logged |
It's good to see that you are making progress! :-) As I've mentioned, I can't even
imagine how hard it must be to learn Hungarian as a second language so I'm rooting for
you. I guess you are right about not memorizing conjugation tables because there are
so many variables in conjugating verbs that even if you memorized a table, you
couldn't use it effectively. Just think about the two numbers, three persons in each,
the three tenses, the moods, definite and indefinite conjugations and there you have
over two hundred forms of a single verb. Okay, some are the same, but conjugation
tables don't care about that. The only way to go in my opinion is to do drills and
kind of get a feel for what sounds right. You obviously need to know some grammar
rules, but I wouldn't concentrate on them that much. And don't worry, sometimes even
native speakers don't get all the forms right. :-)
And I feel with you about the vocabulary. It must be a struggle to learn some of our
words, because you can't relate to them. Actually, Hungarian has a lot of loan words
from different languages (Slavic, German, Turkish), but we tell them our way and it is
hard to find the similarities with other languages.
P.S.: In most cases, it is enough to say 'gép' instead of 'számítógép', people will
know what you mean. :-)
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Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7100 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 8 of 9 20 March 2015 at 6:31pm | IP Logged |
At some point, you may also want to check out e-magyarul1 and e-magyarul2. It's a flash-based set of lessons that correspond more or less to CEFR A1 and A2 respectively, and that make a handy supplement because of the variety of exercises offered (especially so if you have a Hungarian tutor or can understand just enough Hungarian to make sense of the instructions)
I used e-magyarul2 a couple of years ago to complement the drier process of wading through "FSI Hungarian Graded Reader" but the site went offline for a while. It's good that they've been restored.
If you're a little more visually oriented and want to see simple Hungarian in use, there's also Hungarian in Hungary which is a set of videos made by an American university. There are transcripts with translations for each set of dialogues.
The Finnish national broadcaster (YLE) also offers something similar. Even though the explanations and translations are in Finnish, the actors speak quite clearly and there are subtitles in Hungarian so that you can also read along. The vocabulary lists and explanatory notes in Finnish are interspersed with the videos.
Greetings
Sightseeing and timetables
Shopping
In a restaurant
Directions and travelling
Signs and important words
Sok sikert!
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