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Mainlymagyar : My own multiconfused log! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 17 of 35 31 August 2010 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||
WOW! Thanks Chung! That is so freakin' interesting! I never would have picked out those connections! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 18 of 35 07 September 2010 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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My big Hungarian news of the day is that I got to speak Russian! Ha ha ha....
Seriously, I was the only one here at work who knew any Russian and we had a gentleman who only spoke Russian, so I became the translator. It was good fun but also humbling. I have forgotten so much bloody Russian since I took it in college 20 some-odd years ago. When I finish with Hungarian I have GOT to go back and do an intensive Russian refresher course! Well... back to Unit 6 of FSI.... Edited by liddytime on 07 September 2010 at 8:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 19 of 35 14 September 2010 at 3:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Six weeks into attacking a magyar nyelv, the language of Hungary.
Six Units of FSI down. Six Units of DLI down. I was starting to get pretty frustrated with my self-assessed lack of progress. I still can only understand every sixth or seventh word in Hungarian podcasts, I struggle to come up with words and translations with the FSI exercises and I still have trouble understanding what my Hungarian friend at work says to me. She has to say things three or four times interspersed with my “nem értem, nem értem, nem értem!” ( I don’t understand you!). But, Holy Cow?!?!!! Six weeks!! I’ve only been doing this for six weeks and my vocabulary is up to 600 or 700 words. I can at least get the general gist of Hungarian podcasts. I can hold a basic conversation with a Hungarian speaker. Thinking back to when I took Spanish in school, six weeks in we were still learning “como està usted?” and “mi nombre es...”. We couldn’t conduct more than a very basic conversation if at all. Heck, most people I know that took four years of Spanish in school still can’t hold a conversation in Spanish! So looking back, I’m pretty happy with my progress. I think my biggest impediment is still vocabulary. Fluency in a language requires 5000-7000 words. I clearly have a long way to go. But hey?!? I’m nearly 20% there! Hopefully by next spring I can get up to 2000-3000. A new trick that I have been trying is to use Google-Translate to translate my e-mails and web pages into Hungarian. The great thing about it is that I can hover over an unknown word in Hungarian and it will give me the English word immediately. No hunting for every other word in a dictionary any more! What a great tool. Hungarian grammar continues to throw in some intricacies and peculiarities. For example; I recently learned how most verbs in Hungarian have two different forms; the definite and the indefinite. Each has its various rules and guidelines as to how and when to use each specific one. As it seems to me, it comes down to being specific vs. being vague. If I wanted to say “I see THE book” I would say “Látom a könyvet” (definite) but “ I see A book” would be “Látok egy könyvet” (indefinite). Possession in Hungarian is indicated by, you guessed it, suffixes! Rather than saying my book, your book, his book, their book etc., suffixes are added which have a multitude of rules governed by vowel harmony, adding or not adding j’s or a’s and so on... Very similar to Turkish, which I have studied previously. For anyone who is interested, there is a great example table on the Wikipedia page on Hungarian Grammar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_noun_phrase . Viszlát jövő héten! (see you next week!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| logical123 Newbie United States Joined 5340 days ago 31 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German Studies: Norwegian, Persian | Message 20 of 35 14 September 2010 at 3:49am | IP Logged | ||
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I have the teach yourself Hungarian book, bought it for $1.49 at a used book store. After
I get through with my dual study of Norwegian and Persian, I'll probably do Hungarian and Sanskrit (although doing two very difficult languages probably isn't the best of ideas). I am also Hungarian, on my maternal side. I'm into genealogy a fair bit, and recently found censuses with my great-great-grandparents on them, and the country of origin being Austria. Makes sense, seeing that in 1900 or so, Hungary didn't even exist! Viszlát! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 21 of 35 14 September 2010 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, I too have been dabbling in the Teach Yourself Hungarian Book. The CD dialogues are much more lively than the FSI/DLI ones! It is actually pretty good. Hungarian and Sanskrit?!?! Wow, you ARE a glutton for punishment!! :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| logical123 Newbie United States Joined 5340 days ago 31 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German Studies: Norwegian, Persian | Message 22 of 35 14 September 2010 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I unfortunately do not have the CD, and I have looked to no avail for a downloadable copy
online, or even one to buy standalone on amazon. Oh well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 23 of 35 15 September 2010 at 12:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Don't forget your local library! That's where I found it believe it or not. You can also do a used book search on alibris or bookfinder for an out of print edition because the audio hasn't changed since the 1994 edition. Better yet, supply some of the dialogues to rhinospike and have native Hungarians read the dialogues back to you. Rhinospike is great! It is somewhat annoying that Teach Yourself continues to sell its books without the CDs! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6231 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 24 of 35 02 October 2010 at 3:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Mi ujsag! That’s Hungarian for “what’s up”. Literally “what’s the news?”. Mi ujsag is such a great saying. mee ewwi-shag. I’ve even been saying it to non-Hungarian speakers just to get a rise out of them. “Huh? What did you just say? You want to what?!?” I must admit that Hungarian has taken a back seat to...well ... life over the past couple of weeks. Between my birthday, my son’s birthday, a trip to DC and craziness at work, there hasn’t been a ton of time to squeeze in Hungarian. Oh yeah, football season just started, so there go my entire Sundays. ( and Monday nights)... FSI has gotten a bit drole. I have made it about half way through Unit 8 and I think I need a bit of an FSI break. The drills have really started to get a bit monotonous. That coupled with the 1960’s tin-can quality recordings and the dead-pan voices of the instructors have caused me to put the course aside for a bit. I will rejoin it at some point because it really is a good course, but after a brief hiatus. In the meantime, I have revisited the DLI course. It is teaching less hardcore military vocabulary and the tapes are almost like having a real conversation. This is good because there just aren’t many Hungarian speakers in small-town Maine and I really haven’t been able to suck up the courage to talk with strangers in Hungarian over Skype. Sadly, I haven’t seen my Hungarian speaking co-worker in a few weeks either. I know, eventually I’m gonna need to get over it and find some real, live Hungarian speakers to practice with. Otherwise, my family may have me institutionalized as they witness me constantly pacing about the house, talking to myself in Hungarian! I also tracked down a copy of the Assimil course, Hungarian With Ease. I have never used an Assimil course before but many people on the language-geek forums swear by them. So far, I’m fairly impressed. The lessons are very brief so one could easily get through one a day. The recordings are entirely in Hungarian, of decent audio quality and quite entertaining to listen to. Lesson 3, for example, is entitled Egy Külonos Család , or A Strange Family. Lesson 4 is Egy Kíváncsi Rendőr or A Curious Policeman. Much more entertaining! The example sentence they give for definite articles is Az ördög a polkolban lakik/ The devil lives in hell. Hah, I can’t imagine FSI using that one! So this week, Assimil and DLI. We’ll see how it goes. Találkozunk jövő héten barátok! Edited by liddytime on 02 October 2010 at 4:16am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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