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Mainlymagyar : My own multiconfused log! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7153 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 25 of 35 02 October 2010 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The dialogues in Hungarian with Ease sure are funny, but when I was learning Hungarian they provided little more than a light diversion. Assimil's lack of exercises meant that I was left to memorize the phrases and somehow bridge the gap between the grammatical notes and the sentences with no more than a handful of fill in the blank exercises.
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| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6226 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 26 of 35 03 October 2010 at 3:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ha ha ! Yes, I can see what you mean! I think I am using it for just that, a light diversion. Eventually I'll get back to FSI's drill to kill bootcamp method! :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6226 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 27 of 35 15 October 2010 at 2:31am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Nem áll készen az ősszel
Autumn has hit here in the northeast US with a vengeance! Thus, the title Nem áll készen az ősszel which roughly translated means: I’m not ready for autumn!! Hungarian, sadly continues to take a backseat to life. Everything is crazy-busy, plus hosting my family in town last week meant not much time for Magyarul. Over the past week I have exclusively been working through the Assimil course. I have managed to get through the first 16 lessons; although they are mostly a review of what I have learned from the other courses. What is nice about Assimil is each lesson is very short and very manageable. One is only supposed to do one lesson a day and then move on to the next one. True, it doesn’t have the degree of drills and intensivity that FSI/DLI have, but I don’t have 90 minutes a day to devote to Hungarian either at this point! The Assimil dialogues continue to be very entertaining! “De mit csinál a ferjad délután öttól este nyolcig? “ “- Ez maganügy!” “So what does your husband do every evening from 5 until 8?” “That’s a private matter!!!” Ahhh....you gotta love the French!! :-) I’m happy to say that I have been listening to several Hungarian podcasts each week and I can actually understand them now! Again, certainly not every word but definitely more than a few weeks ago. For the news stories, I can now tell what the story is about from listening alone without having to read the title. I also watched an interview in Hungarian from Benny Lewis’ Fluent In 3 Months blog. I nearly wet myself when I discovered I could understand a good 90% of the interview! ( Ok , maybe wet myself is a bit strong... but I was pretty psyched..) Again, it is good to have these little confidence rewards when life gets in the way of good, hard studying. Until next week... légy boldog Edited by liddytime on 15 October 2010 at 2:32am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6226 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 28 of 35 24 November 2010 at 1:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Wow, It has been a record delay since my last post! I know....I know.... excuses are like @@#(*!&-holes, everyone has one and it stinks.... EEK!! I think I just suddenly morphed into one of my coaches from high-school!! Seriously though, I have not neglected my Hungarian studies, I just have had no time whatsoever to keep the log updated. I have made it through negyvenedik lecke ( lesson 40) of the Assimil course. Assimil is great for picking up vocabulary, but not so good for syntax, grammar and free-conversation. We shall see what happens... Supposedly one is supposed to listen passively to the Assimil lessons through the first 50 lessons. Just listen and chat along with the dialogues. Then, for the next 50 lessons, one progresses to the “active” phase where the learner becomes more involved. I’m not convinced it is working yet. It is nice to spend 20 minutes a day on a lesson, then the next day progress to the next one. The material doesn’t seem to be sinking in though. I have re-visited the Defense Language course picking it up with Unit 22. It has graduated from strictly military vocabulary into actual conversations! (hmmmm....sounds familiar....) The units are short enough that I can still get through one every 2 days or so. However, the exercises are much more comprehensive (and better) and the grammatical explanations are still superb. I’m going to try, as time allows, do both of these concurrently. What happened to FSI you might ask?? I just couldn’t pick it up again. The recordings are from 1963 and of poor sound quality which makes them quite hard to listen to....and I just can’t STAND the speakers’ voices !!! I had high hopes to find people to chat with on Skype. I actually found four people that would be willing to Skype with me but I just haven’t had the time. I have been working really long hours and by the time I get home I collapse exhausted!! I have been having fun with my Google translate toolbar. It has a function where you can hover the mouse over a word and it will give the Hungarian translation. I got an e-mail for Benny Lewis’ Fluent in 3 Months website touting his most recent post entitled “Hungarian is Easy”. What?!??! You have got to be kidding me?!?!! Hungarian is widely considered to be among the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn! What, with the 14 different vowels, the 18 cases, the 2 completely different ( definite and indefinite) verb forms, the completely foreign vocabulary and the mercilessly long agglutinative words!! I read his post which is excellent and I encourage you to read it yourself here: http://www.fluentin3months.com/hungarian-is-easy/ Is it possible? Could Hungarian actually be.... gulp .... easy?? It is a bit funny. A few days before I read Benny’s post I was thinking to myself several of the exact same points that he pointed out in his article. The first point of of Hungarian grammar for which I am thankful is NO GENDER! There is no memorizing masculine, feminine or neuter forms. There isn’t even a different word for he and she! It is just ő . After years of learning Romance and Slavic languages I STILL mess this up. Thanks Hungarian! Plural forms? Just add -ok or -k. That is it. Better than German or Arabic where the only way to definitively know the correct plural form is to memorize it! The 18 cases of Hungarian is a myth, which I believe was probably invented by some Hungarian Language Graduate students somewhere to scare people away from learning Hungarian. The cases are mostly prepositions which are merely attached to the word rather than separated like in English. Sure, there is an “accusative” case, which is simply the letter “t” attached to a word to mark it as a direct object. In Slavic languages there can be up to 6 different endings for a given word to mark its case depending on gender and number. Hungarian has one if you don’t count the rules for vowel harmony ( which is pretty easy and intuitive in its own right so I’m not going to count changes for vowel harmony as different case endings!) &nb sp; The odd appearing words native to Hungarian appear incredibly daunting to the novice Hungarian learner. Once a learner accumulates a modest amount of vocabulary ( I’d say 1200 words like myself) , it is amazing how logical it is to figure out the meanings of words. Take szabadsag for example. The word looks pretty intimidating until you realize, a-ha!!. Szabad means free and sag means something like “the state of”. Free-state so it means freedom or liberty! You might recall the Hungarian word for computer számítógép. When one breaks it down szám is number so számító is calculating and gep is machine. Számítógép is a calculating machine or computer! It is very logical once one knows the roots and endings. Verbs? Piece of cake. There are few, if any, irregular verbs and the endings are predictable. There are only 2 tenses past and present.... period! OK, OK... 3 if you include the one verb that can be conjugated in the future tense. Ah, but what about the definite and indefinite verb forms? Compared to the 14 different tenses of the Romance languages, I’ll take definite and indefinite forms any day. It really isn’t difficult. If you are talking about something specific, use the definite and you are being vague, use the indefinite. Hungarian is simply so much fun to speak. The umlauted permutations of Hungarian are just pure joy to say. What other language can you bust out with something like.. Először egy gulyáslevest és egy hideg gyümölcslevest kérünk, utana pedig egy paprikás csirkét, es két uborksalátát is. First we would like the goulash and a cold, fruit soup. Then paprika chicken and two cucumber salads. ( From Teach Yourself Hungarian c1994) I am thoroughly enjoying the experience of learning this somewhat obscure, but absolutely fascinating language! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7153 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 29 of 35 24 November 2010 at 6:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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It's good to see that you're still digging into it. I pretty much went through similar thought processes when I was learning Hungarian. The bottom line is that it's not mind-bogglingly difficult. Yet when viewed by those fluent only in Indo-European languages (and often only in the same small subset of those languages), their perceptions prevail and spread to others who haven't even seen Hungarian thus reinforcing the notion of Hungarian's intractability through hearsay. Some of my Slavonic friends half-jokingly think that I practiced black magic in order to have taught myself some Hungarian. I guess that when they come from Eastern Europe where the majority of the languages are Slavonic (and thus mutually intelligible to greater or lesser degrees), coming across an Eastern European language that is not Indo-European (let alone Slavonic) jolts them into reality where they can't always hope to effect communication using a crudely simplified version of their own language.
I also understand your frustration with Assimil Hungarian with Ease - that's why I ditched it after 17 lessons. :-P 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6148 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 30 of 35 24 November 2010 at 11:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I totally agree. While I liked the method the course uses, it get's very hard to listen to after a while. I think I got as far as Unit 9 before stopping. The older man has a very monotonous voice. Before FSI, I used Assimil and found it very hard to learn Hungarian from. In my more recent excursion, I've enjoyed the Colloquial course. The dialogues are a bit slower than the Teach Yourself course, and the explanations a bit clearer. I've also dipped back into the Assimil course, and like you, it's mainly for vocabulary. Imádom olvasó napló. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6226 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 31 of 35 24 November 2010 at 10:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Absolutely!!! The older guys' voice just killed me! :-) The other problem was that FSI tried to cram SOOOO much into each lesson that they seemed a bit unmanageable. I prefer the shorter lesson styles of DLI and Assimil.
Ha ha! Yeah, I find it is helpful for picking up new vocabulary, but not so much for learning how to speak! Thanks for the comments!!!! If you follow my link I have on my profile - you can connect to my mainlymagyar blog and hear me actually trying to speak the above sentence in Hungarian... pretty funny!! :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6226 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 32 of 35 29 November 2010 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ha ha ha! I have just been told that I speak Hungarian with a Chinese accent!! Perhaps I should be studying Mandarin instead! :-) Edited by liddytime on 29 November 2010 at 6:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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