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Why is Hungarian considered difficult? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 30 07 January 2015 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'll just mention one observation, part 1 and part 2. Last time I was in Albania I boght a guidebook in two versions, one in Albanian and one in some other language, probably English. I then tried to get the structure of the sentences and if possible also the meaning of the individual words in the Albanian version by checking with the translation, and this was surprisingly easy.
On the way home from another Balkan trip I flew with Maleev and snatched a bilingual magazine, Hungarian-English. When I tried to do the same thing with this magazine as I had done with the Albanian guidebooks I found this to be much more difficult. OK, Albanian is an Indoeuropean language, but it does have its own niche in that big group, and I have never really studied it, so in principle it should be just as hard to grasp as Hungarian - but it wasn't. However when I last visited Hungary in connection with the polyglot conference I read one of those small language guides plus a Kauderwelsch booklet and this time didn't find it impossible to see at least the shimmering of some kind of system in the bilingual examples - even though Hungarian to some extent was organized differently from the other languages I have seen. So maybe it isn't really as hard as it sometimes is said. The many cases aren't really scary - if Hungarian is organized as Finnish the cases that deal with position and movements are fairly logically organized. Besides I know more than 26 or 27 prepositions in my other languages, and the heavy use of cases is supposed to diminish the need for propositions. Edited by Iversen on 07 January 2015 at 2:11pm 1 person has 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 18 of 30 07 January 2015 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think you misunderstand Benny's point. The idea of writing the article is to encourage more people to study Hungarian despite its reputation, and to show that there are many easy and intuitive sides to Hungarian despite the fact it looks impenetrable (same for Mandarin). That certain grammatical details such as word order are harder to grasp (and that he may have struggled with those more) doesn't really detract from the idea of encouragement that he is trying to give. All his "language x is easy" posts are written in that vein. See it as positive mentality, not as an analysis of the actual grammatical content of the language, and it'll make reading and understanding his ideas much easier. That's how it has always worked for me. For me, his posts on Chinese for example have been a huge help. And I will not claim to speak x level Chinese here openly because then I'll get a whole lot of bullshit "you got the 2nd/3rd tone wrong on chuantong" or whatever. It's irrelevant. It doesn't matter. It's about inspiring people to study languages that may not seem as obvious, but which have very manageable sides, much more manageable than in some other languages which have different easy bits. Every language is a sudoku and depending on which numbers you get certain parts of the sudoku will be easier. There are always going to be really hard sudokus, those are the advanced level stuff. But once you get good at sudoku solving then you can also do the advanced stuff. And eventually to master a language you need to master all of its aspects, including the easy ones. And then you should absolutely pick all that low- hanging fruit. Even in Chinese there is stuff I can guess from context easily or if I adjust for phonetics. In CHINESE! 6 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 19 of 30 07 January 2015 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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To be honest, I do take some issue with his approach of basically fighting fire with fire. I'd rather put perspective on things rather than simply do what opposition politicians like to do by diametrically opposing a governing party's stance. Benny says Hungarian is easy in the face of others who say that it's hard. I say filter out those noises and Hungarian is still learnable.
As I had posted, it was clear to me even then that he was trying to counteract the factoid of Hungarian being extraordinarily difficult by emphasizing how easy it is. I came out thinking that he oversimplified things, and that as his intended readership (i.e. people who haven't learned Hungarian), he's tacitly suggesting that such people could (should?) regard figuring out Hungarian to be about as onerous as doing the same with an "easy" language from FIGS. Even after a 3-month "mission" in Hungarian, he would have started to see that getting conversational in Hungarian within that time is much more than just figuring out the basics of agglutination, building a small stock of vocabulary, and developing an accent that's understandable to natives. 8 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 20 of 30 07 January 2015 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't consider those tacit suggestions to exist at all, I think he is well aware of the hard work involved. You have an advantage with closely related languages, but you do even have advantages when you do not involve yourself with those. His post is about eradicating the mentality of "hardness" because it's a mental block that people have when learning languages. Maybe there IS a bigger distance, but for you as a learner that shouldn't matter. I personally don't really know how to rate languages as hard or easy anymore, because my first months in any language are almost autopilot by now. I found Chinese easier to learn than French, for example. I am aware that to get to a high level in Chinese is a lot of work, but the ease... for me it was always determined by the mentality I had. And I think he is aware of the hard work involved, given how he's treating his French currently. (And I know what type of thing he does because we share the same teacher). Edited by tarvos on 07 January 2015 at 6:18pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5060 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 21 of 30 08 January 2015 at 1:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Ah, I should have clicked on the link to the "cacti" thread above. What struck me there is that everyone seems to say that the very top tier is Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, and Arabic. It seems strange that the set of most popular non-Indo-European languages almost coincide with the ones that both FSI and the cacti thread think are the hardest. Can it really be true that among Vietnamese, Thai, Lao, Burmese, Khmer, Zulu, Xhosa, Finnish, Hungarian, Mongolian, *all* are measurably at a level below the Difficult Five? And is that also the case for languages FSI doesn't rate, such as Tibetan, Berber, Quechua, Aymara, Guarani, Basque, Tamil? Sadly, it will be a long time before I'll be able to say for myself, as the first five non-IE languages I hope to master (ignoring my small efforts in Modern Hebrew) will be exactly the five that are supposed to be hard.
Could it be that Benny's learning style dampens the effect of language similarity? I can imagine that he thrives on quickly learning to use a small core of high-frequency words and structures, and that that wouldn't be so much harder for a "hard" language. Whereas for someone like me, with an input-based learning style, a related language vs. a hard one can differ by a factor of ten or more in time to reach a given level, the same may not be the case for him. If that's true, then his approach can be seen as independently tackling each particular language, whereas mine is more like building a single web of linguistic knowledge, where some languages fit smoothly into the existing web while others require laying down a huge amount of brand-new knowledge. Edited by robarb on 08 January 2015 at 1:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 22 of 30 08 January 2015 at 8:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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From where does Hungarian get its advanced vocabulary? Is it home made or imported (Latin/Greek)? I suspect that this is a very important factor, especially as you get to specialized and advanced vocabulary. I'm reading a book on physiology in Portuguese at the moment, and it's very easy to understand the technical stuff because words like "sarcoplasmere" and "ribosome" are very similar in Portuguese. Trying to read the same book in Mandarin would be much, much more difficult.
My guess would be that Finnish, even thouh it's not IE, would contain a lot of these borrowings, which would make it substantially easier than a similar language with home-made variants (or imports from Sanskrit, Sino-Japanese or Arabic), regardless of genetic relationships. 1 person has 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 23 of 30 08 January 2015 at 1:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
As far as I understand it, Benny starts with a conversational focus but focuses on input only later. The reason he does this is because he often uses languages in travel settings where this active vocabulary and effective word base is much more useful than input. I'm not sure whether it dampens the effect of "difficulty" (whatever that means), but it provides him with an EASIER TRANSITION into TRAVELLING, considering that's his basic goal. Yours seemingly isn't and then you have a much bigger advantage with related languages since all you have to do is learn to recognise words and then you can produce them later on. But for some of us, that's simply not an option. I'm more in Benny's boat, and most of my students are expats! This is why I focus on speaking a whole lot more whenever I post advice here because it's something I have experience dealing with in daily life and in my work. Consider Chinese: I'm moving to China for six months, of which five will be spent in a city that is not Beijing. I'm not expecting anyone to speak English or understand me at all, and I will have to speak Chinese all day long to get what I want. Therefore my goal is to have conversational Chinese, not because this is somehow the best way to learn a language, or because Hanzi are hard, but because this is the most practically useful. However I would prefer to have better academic French because that's a language in which I can actually read and use academic documents should I have to! 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 24 of 30 08 January 2015 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Technical vocabulary in Hungarian is a hodgepodge of calques, neologisms and direct borrowings. Some of the calques and neologisms might be recognizable if the roots used are ultimately borrowings. Unfortunately I haven't been able to turn up analysis on the composition of this part of the lexicon. To get a sense of what Hungarian technical vocabulary looks like, check out the following articles on Wikipedia including the links in the sources - some of those are more technical than the article on Wikipedia Mitokondrium (mitochondria) Felhő alapú számítástechnika (cloud-based computing) Differenciálegyenlet (Differential equation) Szillogizmus (Syllogism) Három-szurdok-gát (Three Gorges Dam) 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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