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Why is Hungarian considered difficult? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Dylanarama Newbie United States Joined 5440 days ago 30 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 30 31 December 2014 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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So many people consider Hungarian one of the harder languages to learn for English speakers, why is this? Why is something with similar concepts like Turkish considered easier? What makes it so difficult? What makes Turkish easier? I've heard many people say that Hungarian is super logical and regular but isn't Turkish too? Is it just the amount of things you have to learn?
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| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4048 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 2 of 30 01 January 2015 at 1:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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I never studied Hungarian; anyway, the most frequent reason to it appear to be the high number of cases. But according to an increasing number of people, they're not that bad. A Romanian friend of mine once told me "it looks like shit but it is easy".
Benny Lewis posted an article about it, I found it interesting: Why Hungarian is easy Edited by tristano on 01 January 2015 at 1:38pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 3 of 30 01 January 2015 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Because it doesn't look like or work like English.
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| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5833 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 4 of 30 01 January 2015 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Who says Hungarian is harder than Turkish? This is news to me.
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| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 5 of 30 01 January 2015 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Probably in reference to FSI's ranking for English speakers. Although Hungarian is in the same ranking group as Turkish, it's flagged as being more difficult than other languages in the same group. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Dylanarama Newbie United States Joined 5440 days ago 30 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* | Message 6 of 30 01 January 2015 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||
The language profiles on this very website for one! 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 7 of 30 01 January 2015 at 9:28pm | IP Logged | ||
I consider coming to terms with Hungarian or Turkish to be the same in overall difficulty for a monoglot English-speaker. I do think though that the perception of Hungarian being extremely hard is affected/distorted by being surrounded by a handful of Indo-European languages ranging from German which is somewhat transparent to an English-speaker to Romanian and a few Slavonic tongues which are less so. These people can notice the similarities among this set of languages. In particular, I suspect that the varying intra-intelligibility of the Slavonic languages in the Carpathian Basin sharpens the perception that Hungarian is impenetrable and impossible to learn. For example, the average monoglot Serb can at least sometimes get the gist of some snippet of Slovak, Rusyn, Ukrainian etc. which he almost certainly couldn't do when coming up against Hungarian. With Turkish the perception for the average English-speaking monoglot is less clear and I think it reflects a certain indirect Eurocentrism or even Orientalism. One either has no idea of what Turkish even looks or sounds like, or could be mentally lazy and just think that it must be hard because it's "Eastern" or not Standard Average European. To tie it with the perception of Hungarian, you're combining the Standard Average European "wiring" of English-speakers with Turkish being often associated with Asia (i.e. non-European) which means that the uniqueness or intractability of Hungarian gets magnified (despite it sometimes being considered a peripheral part of Standard Average European). Hungarian is spoken in Europe and so "should" look more familiar than Turkish. The latter doesn't look that uniquely difficult since it's associated with the "East" and in a region where people count as their mother tongues Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, Kurdish, Farsi or Greek which all are largely "weird" or "exotic" to English-speaking people. For related discussion, see the following: Difficulty of Turkish How difficult is Hungarian? 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4033 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 8 of 30 04 January 2015 at 2:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Hungarian has more vowels, consonants, consonant clusters, and often some cases of irregular vowel harmony than
Turkish. It has an indefinite and definite article which can mean a gigantic difference and has something like phrasal verbs too. Hungarian grammar looks to me like a more beefed up type of agglutinating grammar than Turkish's. As for being super regular, Hungarian is, but due to certain historical events, it has very very irregular derivational morphology with numerous upon numerous random alternants and extensions like IE languages unlike its other Uralic cousins. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Hungarian_suffixes Turkish chose to keep its derivation the way it is, hence Turkish vocabulary is more transparent and a bit easier to learn. Edited by Stolan on 04 January 2015 at 2:32am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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