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0 to conversational Hungarian in 3 months | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7165 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 9 of 52 22 July 2010 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
benny's comments are pretty much bang-on with what I experienced when I first learned Hungarian. The biggest bugbears for me at first were indeed unfamiliar vocabulary and definite versus indefinite conjugation. Parroting the number of cases has done little but unnecessarily intimidate potential learners who have been raised in Western European pedagogy which holds Latin and its grammatical gender with 7 cases in fusional morphology as a kind of special or idealized reference point. :-P Another difficult aspect of Hungarian that will become apparent is mastering word-order. It's fairly complex in Hungarian and using the order that's most "natural-sounding" to Hungarians is one of the higher hurdles to overcome when learning Hungarian to an advanced level. Producing a short sentence in Hungarian to express a general meaning is easy enough but going beyond that is a different story. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| yearlyglot Triglot Newbie United States yearlyglot.com/Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5355 days ago 2 posts - 2 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian Studies: German, Italian, Lithuanian | Message 10 of 52 22 July 2010 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
This doesn't come off as much different to me. I'm admittedly speaking from complete ignorance of Hungarian, with the exception of what's written in his description. But it sounds to me like the basic 7-case system, with the exception of replacing the prepositional case with individual morphemes for each preposition. To me, this sounds no more difficult than the prefixed verbs of motion in any Slavic language. In fact, given a lack of genders and a standard formation of plural, it sounds much easier than a Slavic language. Edited by yearlyglot on 22 July 2010 at 11:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| irishpolyglot Nonaglot Senior Member Ireland fluentin3months Joined 5642 days ago 285 posts - 892 votes Speaks: Irish, English*, French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Sign Language Studies: Mandarin | Message 11 of 52 22 July 2010 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@yearlyglot Note that I'm only listing what I find easy and what stands out most as hard here. The different sentence structure makes it clear that this is a non-Indo-European language and thus has harder aspects than Slavic languages would have. The word order (as mentioned by Chung) will also take some getting used to and I relied a lot on some familiar words and phrasing of sentences when learning Czech, and I won't have this crutch in Hungarian.
It has very flexible word order, so you won't be "wrong" by saying it another way, but it may not sound right and it will be hard for me to get used to hearing words in strange positions and "prepositions" embedded within words. I generally don't like rating languages in order of difficulty, with Slavic higher or lower than Hungarian. I'm not quite saying "phhhh Hungarian is a sinch!" I'm just stating the philosophy in approaching it I'm taking ;) Basically I'm all for encouraging people to hopefully think certain languages aren't that bad, but I don't like the idea of strata of difficulty and this putting Hungarian below other ones because of my superficial description... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7165 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 12 of 52 23 July 2010 at 12:42am | IP Logged | |||||
On the surface, 16 to 24 cases sounds intimidating (especially when you see how certain Indo-European languages use cases with endings that also have to account for number and gender). This was my point because when people are used to certain Indo-European languages, "cases" becomes a bit of a dirty word. I think that part of the problem arises from not realizing that case relations in a predominantly agglutinative language get expressed differently from what's in a predominantly fusional one.
What you describe is pretty much it, however. Namely that where you would use a preposition and attendant change in the following noun or adjective's ending, you'd either attach a suffix/prefix to the nominative form of the noun/adjective or use a postposition. The Hungarian suffixes, prefixes and postpositions do very similar functions to what Russian case endings and prepositions do. "train" поезд vonat (nom. sing.) поезд vonatot (acc. sing.) поезду vonatnak (dat. sing.) в поезде vonatban (loc. sing. / inessive sing.) поездa vonatok (nom. plur.) поездa vonatokat (acc. plur.) поездaм vonatoknak (dat. plur.) в поездах vonatokban (loc. plur. / inessive plur.) "without a train" без поездa (Russ. uses gen. sing.) vonat nélkül (Hung. uses a postposition but the noun "vonat" stays in the nom.) "without trains" без поездов (Russ. uses gen. plur.) vonatok nélkül (Hung. uses a postposition but the noun "vonat" stays in the nom. and only marked for number - hence the plural ending -(o)k) "book" книга könyv (nom. sing.) книгу könyvet (acc. sing.) книге könyvnek (dat. sing.) в книге könyvben (loc. sing. / inessive sing.) книги könyvek (nom. plur.) книги könyveket (acc. plur.) книгам könyveknek (dat. plur.) в книгах könyvekben (loc. plur. / inessive plur.) "without a book" без книги (Russ. uses gen. sing.) könyv nélkül (Hung. uses a postposition but the noun "könyv" stays in the nom.) "without books" без книг (Russ. uses the gen. plur.) könyvek nélkül (Hung. uses a postposition but the noun "könyv" stays in the nom. and only marked for number - hence the plural ending -(e)k) As you can see Hungarian case-marking by agglutination entails adding morphemes in a certain order to the nominative singular stem with each morpheme marking just one "dimension". Russian case-marking by fusion entails changing endings with the ending accounting for number, gender and the case-relation itself. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Britomartis Groupie United States Joined 5818 days ago 67 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin | Message 13 of 52 23 July 2010 at 9:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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Forgive the excursion into fangirl-ishness, but I had no idea you were a member here. I love your blog. Anyways, best of luck with Hungarian! Edited by Britomartis on 23 July 2010 at 9:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| irishpolyglot Nonaglot Senior Member Ireland fluentin3months Joined 5642 days ago 285 posts - 892 votes Speaks: Irish, English*, French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Sign Language Studies: Mandarin | Message 14 of 52 23 July 2010 at 11:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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haha fangirl :P
In Berlin I have been approached by no less than FOUR people randomly in the street/public transport who said "Oh my god, are you Benny from fluentin3months??" I love the Internet :P 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kisfroccs Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5418 days ago 388 posts - 549 votes Speaks: French*, German*, EnglishC1, Swiss-German, Hungarian Studies: Italian, Serbo-Croatian | Message 15 of 52 23 July 2010 at 11:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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Szioka !
Hogy van ? I`m glad someone is learning Hungarian too. I`m learning now since a year and I find it difficult, especially the vocabulary, and to express something. But the language is fun, and really entertaining. :) Two weeks ago I was in Hungary, in Pecs to be more precise. The town is really beautiful and because this year it is Kulturhaupstadt 2010, they renovated mostly everything. The people are really friendly, but you will see that most of the people speak at least German, or a bit English. In my case, I had just one time to really struggle with my Hungarian, since they spoke only Hungarian. But I`m proud to say that after a year I could express the basics :) Two years ago I was in Bp, beautiful too, but I understand nothing, since I hadn-t begun to learn. I hope you can fullfill you quest :D and sok sikert ! Minden jot, Kisfroccs (P.s. I`m in Greece, and don`t have the properly accent) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| irishpolyglot Nonaglot Senior Member Ireland fluentin3months Joined 5642 days ago 285 posts - 892 votes Speaks: Irish, English*, French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Sign Language Studies: Mandarin | Message 16 of 52 30 July 2010 at 12:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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@Kisfroccs Yes, I can definitely see learning vocabulary as being an interesting challenge! On the plus side it seems generous with prefixes and suffixes that expand on the meaning. This helped me a lot with Czech and Esperanto for example, so I hope it is somewhat logical in Hungarian!
I'll be in Pécs for my first week! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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