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How difficult is Hungarian? | ||
Tags: Hungarian | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4779 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes  Speaks: Russian | Message 1 of 32 27 December 2011 at 7:15am | IP Logged | ||
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According to the British Foreign Service, Hungarian is ranked as the second highest in difficulty after Basque. Hungarian is considered even more difficult than Mandarin.
I understand Hungarian has 24 cases. Is that why it is so difficult? Just looking at the words, a Hungarian spelling bee probably wouldn't last more than a couple of minutes. What about the Slovak minority of Hungary? How well do they speak Hungarian? I would assume that some immigrants to Hungary have learned it, but do any of them actually speak it at a native level? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Voodie Tetraglot Newbie Russian Federation Joined 4805 days ago 17 posts - 40 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, GermanC1, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Written), Greek | Message 2 of 32 27 December 2011 at 10:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I second this question.
I've been toying with the idea of studying Hungarian myself. From what I've read about it, it didn't seem SO difficult to me, especially after Arabic, hehehe... Anyway, the cases are quite numerous, but the grammar seems to be extremely regular and logical, you won't have different declensions like in Russian. What is more, there is no gender. I heard that many people have problems with the word order, cause it's rather flexible. But again - if you know Russian, it will probably be easier for you to get used to that particular feature. I hope someone will shed more light on this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jdmoncada Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5035 days ago 470 posts - 741 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Finnish Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 3 of 32 27 December 2011 at 3:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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I studied it for a while but didn't get very far. I didn't quit because it was very difficult but because I had to learn Finnish instead. From my admittedly limited experience, it wasn't that horrible.
So I'm not sure I would agree with the "more difficult than Mandarin" assessment unless Mandarin is sneakily easy somewhere. And no one has ever said *that*... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| math82 Newbie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5428 days ago 17 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 32 27 December 2011 at 4:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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The British Foreign Service ratings are from an English native's point of view, and so if your native language is Russian you'll be already be familiar with some of the grammar features that make Hungarian strange for English speakers.
Grammar: People get a little scared of "24 cases", but it's really just post-position equivalents of English prepoistions. As Hungarian has no gender classes, these endings are regular for pretty much all nouns. So I would say the system is less complex than the Russian system of 'noun gender - preposition + case ending'. Plus you'll be used to flexible word order, though there are sublte changes in meaning that are difficult for non natives. The verb system has a unique (I think) definite vs. indefinite object conjugation system, which might be a real challenge for Russian speakers who have problems with this concept. Pronunciation: The vowel harmony that changes some of the post-position sounds is quite natural and not too hard to pick up. Spelling is a good regular match for pronunciation, as is fixed word stress (first syllable), again easier than Russian I think. There are some very strange feeling rules for question intonation, which I found very different from any Indo-European language. Some of the vowels (ó ö ő ü ű ú é á ű í) may be tough for Russian speakers, and the double consonants are very new at first. I learned to pronounce them by finding pairs of English words that end and start with the same sound e.g. black - cap / fat-tin. The pause between the words when spoken together is what happens in Hungarian doubled consonants. I don't quite see how it is supposed to be second only to Basque in difficulty. I would say Japanese has a similar grammar system, plus odd things for europeans, such as topic markers and honorifics, and three totally new writing systems. In my opinion this would make Japanese harder by many factors. So yes, don't be put off by scare stories about 1000 cases in Hungarian : ) I think it's beautiful and quite unique. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 32 27 December 2011 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | ||
yeah, the Finnish cases make far more sense than the tabelvortoj+prepositions in Esperanto :PPP the number of cases matters far less than the way they work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5057 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 6 of 32 27 December 2011 at 5:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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What is so difficult in double consonants? That's like ванна, поддержка, вводить and so
on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| math82 Newbie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5428 days ago 17 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 7 of 32 27 December 2011 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | ||
Native English speakers (such as myself) don't have them in single words. So the concept and pronuncation can be new and difficult : ) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 8 of 32 27 December 2011 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||
On its own that's an odd characterization by the British Foreign Service. FSI has ranked Asiatic languages such as Arabic, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Mandarin as even more difficult to learn for native speakers of English. A less obvious but arguably larger source of difficulty in Hungarian is its flexible word order; this is especially apparent for speakers of English as we're used to much less flexible word order. Ascribing its difficulty to the number of cases is in my view a bit of a logical fallacy brought on by people exposed only to declension in certain Indo-European languages where cases reflect gender and number and are not a matter of mechanically stringing discrete endings to the noun as is common in Hungarian. The reasoning goes that Latin is "difficult" because it has 7 cases whereas English is "simple" because it has virtually no cases, but then Hungarian must be mind-blowing because it has at least 16 cases (one could argue for there being more cases depending on how one interprets certain suffixes). Hungarian spelling is quite phonemic (somewhat less correctly "phonetic"). Length of words doesn't necessarily create problems although the Hungarian j and ly are pronounced the same thus tripping up less careful spellers. In addition long vowels may be perceived as short or even differently in quick or dialectal speech (e.g. I remember a friend who regularly said ürülök annak, hogy... rather than "proper" örülök annak, hogy... ("I'm glad that...")) As far as I know most of the Slovak minority in Hungary speaks Hungarian to the point of being able to pass of as native speakers as all children learn Hungarian in school regardless of ethnicity (it'd be no different from young children raised in the USA by their Chinese parents becoming able to speak English natively because of exposure and schooling). However what the Slovak minority in Hungary speaks at home may very well be the "Lowland" Slovak dialect. Per this post, maxval is probably the best example on the forum of a non-Hungarian having learned Hungarian in a Hungarian school (in Hungary?) to the point of native fluency (or at least he's defined it as his mother tongue notwithstanding his criticisms of his intonation) 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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