Comments on: Mission: Conversational Hungarian in 3 months

By: Kartik Tripathi

Kartik Tripathi — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 04:14:00 +0000

Benny, no offence, but I couldn’t help feeling that you’re somewhat exaggerating the discount one gets on learning a language from the same family. Indo-European languages from separate parts of Eurasia have been diverging for over 3000 years.
As a native Hindi speaker, I found Japanese much more ‘familiar’ than Russian; other than the same sentence structure, a sophisticated system of honorifics, and usage of post-positions rather then prepositions; I actually occasionally encountered idiomatic statements that had literal equivalents in my native language. By contrast, Russian had very few cognates or grammatical similarities with any other language I knew.
I’m not disputing, of course, that Hungarian is a particularly tough nut to crack. All the best! Darn, I just noticed the article’s over a year old. Well, then I hope it worked out well!

By: Benny Lewis

Benny Lewis — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:44:00 +0000

I visited Pécs

By: Bicskey Zsolt

Bicskey Zsolt — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 13:55:00 +0000

szia, hogy vagy? tetszik a kihivas I’d love to talk to you on skype just for the sake of fun. I’m from Budapest but lived in Pecs for 4 years not I live in Baltimore

By: Aniko

Aniko — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 20:24:00 +0000

Nem hinném…

I don’t think so, man.
Szia has to be one of those stupid adaptations that we Hungarian oh-so-often do… szia is see-ya but we didn’t consider the actual meaning of the word (“see you later”) … instead we’ve just mindlessly started using it to look “cool”… hehehe

By: Aniko

Aniko — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 20:14:00 +0000

that’s awesome. thanks for explaining. makes me wanna learn Finnish…. hehehe

By: Aniko

Aniko — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 20:14:00 +0000

that’s awesome. thanks for explaining. makes me wanna learn Finnish…. hehehe

By: Benny the language hacker

Benny the language hacker — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:18:00 +0000

http://www.fluentin3months.com/speak-badly/

By: Benny the language hacker

Benny the language hacker — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:18:00 +0000

http://www.fluentin3months.com/speak-badly/

By: Benny the language hacker

Benny the language hacker — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:17:00 +0000

You can also make extremely uncommon long words in Hungarian. These serve no purpose other than to intimidate since they are NOT part of natural spoken language.

By: Benny the language hacker

Benny the language hacker — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 20:56:00 +0000

English speaking culture doesn’t encourage and motivate people to learn languages enough. There is no inherent intelligence at play, but thanks

By: Benny the language hacker

Benny the language hacker — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:21:00 +0000

Köszi!

By: Kata

Kata — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 09:10:00 +0000

Isten hozott nálunk! Sok szerencsét a magyarhoz!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 12:24:00 +0000

Tere Audrey! Kas sulle meeldis su elu Eestis?

Just to be clear though, Estonian does have adpositions (both pre- and post-) as well as having cases. Sometimes you even use an adposition and a case where in English you’d only use a preposition.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 12:04:00 +0000

Sok sikert és jó tanulást!

By: brianfrommaine

brianfrommaine — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 17:15:00 +0000

Benny, I updated my own Hungarian learning log if you are interested!

http://mainlymagyar.wordpress.com/

Szeretem a magyar nyelvet eddig!

By: Rossana

Rossana — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:57:00 +0000

Good luck! After improving English I will learn Hungarian. “to have” in Hungarian is similar to the latin possession dativ. àllat=animal orvos=doctor. én àllatorvos leszek: mi estos bestkuracisto!

By: Will

Will — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 02:51:00 +0000

I hate that! So much! That’s probably one of the things that annoys me most about Czech. I mean, I know people do it every day without even thinking about it, but it can be so hard to wrap your head around sometimes. I think, like you said you did, I would prefer the Estonian/Finnish/Hungarian style… despite the increased number of cases.

By: Audrey

Audrey — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 20:36:49 +0000

I don't speak Hungarian, but I do speak Estonian since I was a Peace Corps volunteer there many years ago. The accent and words in Hungarian are very different form Estonian (Finnish is much more similar), but the grammar is supposed to be very similar. I actually think that the lack of prepositions makes it a lot of fun – you only have to learn cases, no prepositions. You can be really creative with sentence structure.

After Estonian, I thought that learning other languages would be easy. Then I moved to the Czech Republic and got very annoyed by the fact that I had to learn both cases and prepositions.

Good luck. Should be a lot of fun. Budapest is a great city.

By: Lucas

Lucas — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:07:02 +0000

Szia, hogy vagy? / Ola, tudo bem? / Hi, how are you?

Sou Brasileiro e vivo na Hungria ja tem 1 ano.
I'm Brazilian and I live in Hungary for one year already.

Eu comecei a trabalhar em Budapeste ha alguns meses atras usando o Espanol e eu gostaria de te encontrar e compartilhar minhas experiencias sobre o aprendizado do hungaro e saber mais sobre as suas experiencias sobre o aprendizado de idiomas(principalmente portugues, quero ver se voce eh mesmo um Carioca! heheheheh)

I started working in Budapest some months ago using Spanish language and I would like to meet you and share my experiences about learning Hungarian and know more about your experiencies in learning languages(mainly portuguese, i wanna see if you are really "Carioca", heheheheeh)

Szia,

E-mai/MSN: mlt-sp [at] h o t m a i l . c o m

Lucas

By: brianfrommaine

brianfrommaine — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:58:09 +0000

Benny,

I too am trying to learn Hungarian...but I'm giving myself longer than 3 months! As per your advice I started a blog which is documenting my quest to conquer this challenging language.

Anyone, feel free to visit it at:

http://mainlymagyar.wordpress.com/

any words of encouragement or advice will be gladly appreciated!!