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How difficult is Hungarian? | ||
Tags: Hungarian | Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6230 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 9 of 32 27 December 2011 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If you have never studied a foreign language before, Hungarian might come across as difficult. However I found it easy compared to Slavic and Romance languages! Here's why,
Those were the reasons I could think of off the top of my head. I haven't touched Hungarian in a year, but the other day I picked up a comic that was completely in Hungarian. I could understand a good 75% of it! & that's after a year! Hungarian tends to stick with you. Try it, you'll be hooked! Addendum: This is what I found as far as the British Foreign Service's Scale: from: http://www.baylanguages.com/language-scale The British Foreign Office Diplomatic Service Language Centre lists languages in 5 levels of difficulty (class 1 being the hardest) Class I Cantonese/ Japanese/ Korean/ Mandarin. Class II Amharic/ Arabic Azeri/ Burmese/ Cambodian/ Finnish/ Hebrew/ /Georgian/ Hungarian/ Kazakh/ Kirghiz/ Lao/ Mongolian/ Thai/ Turkmen/ Turkish/ Uzbek/ Vietnamese. Class III Albanian/ Armenian Byelorussian/ Bulgarian/ Croatian/ Czech Dari/ Estonian/ Greek/ Hausa/ Icelandic/ Kurdish/ Latvian/ Lithuanian/ Macedonian/ Maltese/ Persian/ Polish/ Russian/ Serbian/ Slovak/ Slovene/ Ukrainian. Class IV Bengali/ Chichewa/ Chinyanji/ German/ Gujurati/ Hindi/ Indonesian/ Irish/ Malay/ Nepali/ Pashtu/ Punjabi/ Romanian/ Sesotho/ Shona/ Siswati/ Swahili/ Tagalog/ Urdu/ Wolof/ Yoruba/ Zulu. Class V Afrikaans/ Bislama/ Catalan/ Danish/ Dutch/ French/ Italian/ Norwegian/ Portugese / Spanish/ Swedish. Edited by liddytime on 27 December 2011 at 7:39pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| theomegamale Newbie United States Joined 4965 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, Danish, Thai, Greek, Hungarian | Message 10 of 32 27 December 2011 at 10:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I am sure Hungarian cannot be that difficult when you really get into it. I have only scratched the surface (absolutely no practice with grammar), and it still seems pretty simple. I just think that the long, accent-heavy words scare many people away. You can't even guess how a Hungarian word is said, and that is saying something considering it uses the Latin alphabet. And when you study, half of your guesses are wrong (you could never have guessed that the letter "s" by itself is pronounced like "sh"). I feel that how Hungarian looks from an outsider looking in is intimidating. However, the fear goes away once you actually do things with it.
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| 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 11 of 32 28 December 2011 at 12:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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offtopic but i wonder why they consider Estonian easier than Finnish. or Romanian harder than Portuguese or Norwegian - just because there are *some* cases? :)
and if you consider the resources available (especially if you find most FSI/DLI stuff boring!), many languages would move to the hardest class just because there are so few courses or even good dictionaries. 2 persons have 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 12 of 32 28 December 2011 at 4:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Assigning a higher level of difficulty to Romanian compared to Norwegian or Portuguese seems plausible since the average monoglot of English may be thrown off by Romanian being noticeably divergent from other Romance languages because of the effects of the Balkan Sprachbund, relatively less analytical typology in certain areas and the noticeable Slavonic influence in vocabulary.
However I'm at a loss why the British consider Estonian easier to learn than Finnish (those blokes must have some magic cipher to derive correctly the partitive forms in Estonian because I've seen no rhyme or reason to it) when the Americans via FSI consider Estonian and Finnish to be pretty much the same in difficulty for a monoglot native speaker of English. 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 13 of 32 28 December 2011 at 4:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
On one hand it's not that unique since some other languages in Uralic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut conjugate verbs following the same principle. However the Hungarian approach is unique in that it's relatively simple (as far as I know) as this comparison to Mordvin and Mansi's system shows. The expression of this type of conjugation is similarly complex in languages other than Hungarian whose conjugation adheres to this general concept. Hungarian is the most widely-known language that demonstrates this type of conjugation though and even this relatively simple distinction in conjugation can take some practice for most outsiders before they can use it correctly. 2 persons have 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 14 of 32 28 December 2011 at 5:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
*looks at the list again* Russian, Icelandic, Ukrainian easier than Finnish??? The Slavic ones at least have a little more loan words, but in all three you're guessing which of the 35348568 possible ways to modify the word is correct, aren't you? as opposed to calmly making all those 3456848 forms and choosing from them. Edited by Serpent on 28 December 2011 at 5:31am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 15 of 32 28 December 2011 at 6:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The ranking differs from FSI's in several places, and based on what I know about the
languages listed, I tend to rather trust FSI's version. For example, I see no reason why Persian would be significantly more difficult than Urdu, or why German would be on the same level as Irish and Zulu. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| maxval Pentaglot Senior Member Bulgaria maxval.co.nr Joined 5074 days ago 852 posts - 1577 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, Bulgarian, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Latin, Modern Hebrew | Message 16 of 32 28 December 2011 at 2:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think all languages are very difficult. It depends on the learners native language which language is more difficult for him and which is easier. Obviously, for an English speaker Hungarian is more difficult than most other European languages. However I doubt Chinese is easier for an English native speaker than Hungarian - I think this is impossible!
"Case" is an Indo-European concept. Hungarian is not an Indo-European language. So it is a matter of discussion if Hungary has any cases, and if has, how many. It depends on the definition what is a "case"...
There are almost no REAL minorities today in Hungary, except the Gypsies. Minorities have been heavily assimilated, and now even people who consider themselves not of Hungarian ethnicity, speaks Hungarian as native language. Hungarian Slovaks are almost completely Hungarian speaking. You can find Slovak native speakers only among the older generations. Younger generations speak only Hungarian, or speak both Hungarian and Slovak, but their first language is Hungarian. Edited by maxval on 28 December 2011 at 2:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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