So my first language was Bengali, but my “mother” language was solidly English by the time I was three years old. I grew up bilingual (with Bengali a “weak” second language). I studied German in high school and French in college.
I believe I’m pretty good with languages, and if I had chosen to devote more of my time to learning languages properly, I believe I’d be pretty good at it.
I started using Duolingo to learn French and Italian, and I’m not doing badly. I decided to add Irish, and it’s harder, but I think if I spend more time on it, I could learn it. The word-initial inflections and the two-tier consonant system make it harder than the other languages I’ve learned.
Then I tried Hungarian … Jehosephat H. Kewpie Doll. I can not get a hang on that language. I can’t even get from one lesson to another. It’s such a heavily inflected language that my mind can’t grasp the patterns through small 15-minute lessons.
I bet I could learn this language, but I’d have to spend several hours a day of intense study.
Anyone else have thoughts/experiences with Hungarian? Any Hungarians or other Europeans?
Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the time to devote to really learn this language right now, which makes me sad, because it’s fascinating. (I think I might have to let Irish go by the wayside for now too, although it’s a beautiful language.)
It’s technically my first language, so I learned it the ‘easy’ way. It’s not related to many languages so that makes it harder. In some ways it is easier. If you learn all 44 letters, you can sound out any word even if you don’t know what means. Emphasis is always on the first syllable of the word.
One thing that may help, the vowels of the suffixes match the vowels of the base word. So what can seem like different endings are really the same with different vowel sounds.
I like this NativLang video about it even though he’s not a native speaker.
Apparently Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language, is agglutinative whereas the other languages you mention are Indo-European and therefore more synthetic. I would tell you what all that means, but it’s all Greek to me :smack:.
My grandparents were born and raised in Hungary, and they moved back there for a year with my father and his siblings. But they couldn’t even agree how to pronounce our family name.
It means the grammar works like Lego blocks. Instead of memorizing inflections (like in synthetic Latin), you just stick the pieces on the end that you need (suffixes). It’s actually a lot simpler and quicker to learn that way. The same suffix (with vowels adjusted as needed) works for all words. There is no gender, no different sets of declensions to be memorized.
The thing that challenged me was having to learn two conjugations for each verb, the definite and indefinite. Never found that in any other language I’d studied.
Just got done saying Hungarian grammar isn’t synthetic, but interestingly one verb ending is polysynthetic like in some American Indian languages, the suffix -lek which encodes first person singular subject and second person singular object, “I … thee.” So when added to the verb szeret ‘love’, szeretlek means ‘I love you’.
Every other language you mentioned, even Irish in all its glorious weirdness (compared to the others) and far-flung Bengali, are part of the Indo-European language family. For all their differences, they share a common origin and have things in common that, while they may not be obvious to anyone outside a linguist, nonetheless exist.
Hungarian is part of a different language family. It’s a lot different.
I expect your brain is a little surprised that things that were constants in all those other languages are different in Hungarian.
I have been fully aware about the makeup of the language families for decades. The fact that it’s very different is not a surprise for me. And I was aware in theory of the basic structural differences between Indo-European and Uralic languages.
I knew it would be a different kind of challenge and somewhat more complicated to learn. I was however not expecting exactly how much harder it it is for me to learn.
Yes, that’s what I meant - YOU, the conscious you, knew about the difficulty. But the bits of your brain that handle language processing didn’t “know” that until you actually started asking that they process this new stuff. You’re having to re-train your brain, which has to make new connections or whatever the current metaphor is.
It’s like studying a new sport by video and other means, then trying to actually perform the motions. No matter how much you know ahead of time that it’s going to be hard, it isn’t until you get into the awkward fumbling part of learning a new skill that it really sinks in.
I never tried to study Hungarian but I did take a few Finnish lessons back in 2001. These languages are related, as you most probably already know.
On the whole, I’ve always been pretty good at learning languages, but Finnish was a real challenge, for the same reasons you describe. The conjugation system was extremely weird to me but I think I could perhaps have gotten the hang of it after a (long) while and lots of practice. What really threw me was the complete alienness of the vocabulary. I had a really hard time memorizing even the most basic words.
I never got very far, certainly not much further than a dozen basic stock phrases, most of which I’ve now forgotten. The class I was taking was closed after the first few weeks due to not meeting the students quota, and although the teacher offered to teach us semi-privately at his flat, it proved unpractical and I gave up soon afterwards.
In all likelyhood, I’ll never speak Finnish. I just don’t have the will to try again now that I’m older. I’ve got my sights set on Italian, which seems much, much more doable. I still need to find the time to get down to it, though.
My mother was born in Hungary, and I still have the same problems as you with regard to learning the damn language. I can’t even get my tongue around all the vowels properly.
The tense that I found weirdest was in Portuguese; I no longer recall its name (you probably know what it is). It’s the way you have to say that someone said something. For example, if Morris tells me, “I have to take my cat to the vet tomorrow,” then later when I’m talking to Jane I can say, in English, “Morris told me he has to take his cat to the vet” without worrying about any special tenses. But in Portuguese, “he has to” would need to be expressed in a particular tense because I’m saying what Morris said. (Feel free to correct me if that’s a poor/incorrect example - it’s been many years since I studied Portuguese and I have forgotten virtually all of it.)
There are other tense considerations in Portuguese that don’t exist in English, but most of them seemed to make useful distinctions. That “quote tense” was the only one that seemed unnecessary.
I spent over 5 years living in Hungary, and even had a Hungarian girlfriend. That didn’t help me learn the language much beyond the basics. My vocabulary is pretty decent, but I have difficulty stringing together something more than a basic sentence. As a language, it doesn’t sound “foreign” to me, but my comprehension isn’t full by any stretch. When I left is when I started to feel it all really starting to congeal inside my head. The problem is, I never really needed to speak Hungarian all that much. I could get by with basic pub and restaurant Hungarian, give directions, buy stuff at the supermarket, buy tickets, etc., all the normal day-to-day stuff I needed and was likely to encounter people unable to speak English, but more involved conversations, no.
On the other hand, I have a friend from the UK who was monolingual, and in his 20s he ended up sleeping in a ditch in Eastern Hungary his first night there, found work immediately as an English language teacher in a town where there were practically zero English language speakers, and became fluent within a year or so. His Hungarian is so good and so natural that speakers in Budapest mistake him for someone who grew up in Eastern Hungary (because he has some tell-tale Eastern Hungarian accents.) I’ve been to many bars with him where he’s struck up conversation with the locals, and they are dumbfounded that he isn’t a born Hungarian. He did a lot of translating and interpreting work, and now just got his degree in forensic linguistics.
The tense of the verb can change if its object is being used in an indefinite or a definite sense. So, while in English, “I like fish” and “I like this fish” use the same word ‘like’, in hungarian, you would conjugate like differently to say that you like fish in general rather than a specific fish or piece of fish.
Weird? They even came up with a new way to spell “SH” as in Saoirse Ronan and Aisling Bea. I figured the people who first wrote down Irish lacked experience with letters and how they work, but I see that they had a spelling reform in 1948 so now they’re just messing with us.
“I only understand railway station,” though Google translates it as, “I do not get it.” There’s a reason that “idiomatic” and “idiotic” have so much in common. Still, it’s a wonder the Austro-Hungarian Empire held together longer than a week.
I don’t know how similar Finn and a Hungarian but they are both Uralic languages
For English speakers diphthongs can be a challenge but just pay attention to the timing. Because Uralic languages have no connection to Latin or Germanic language groups it is hard because your ear doesn’t know what to listen for and some things you take for granted are actually harder to learn in English.
Finnish is far easier to learn if you take time to train your ear to listen for the meter and figure out the vowel harmony but if you try to use the typical rote practice methods that you can get away with in Latin or Germanic languages it will be very hard.
I should call out that Finnish has very clear and hard rules that Hungarian may not, but if you are hitting a wall in learning the language take a step back and spend some time training your ear. Perhaps spelling isn’t fully phonetic in Hungarian but people complain about Finnish being hard yet kindergarteners are expected to have a firm grasp on reading before they even arrive at school. That would never happen for English.
While the new media likes to claim this is due to some cultural reason, the real reason is mostly that the spelling is 100% phonetic and the rules are consistent.
It is very hard to learn how to say “Lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas” through rote memorization but if you grasp the timing and the vowel sounds it is easy to break it down to “airplane jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student” just as you would in English with pauses.
IMHO You will have more success if you practice diphthongs and listening before you try to memorize words and phrases. At least Hungarian uses consonant lengthening so you don’t have to figure out how to say both consonants in a word like “kukka”.
Now if only I could find people to practice my Finnish with, which is the main issue I face with progressing as I can’t call my brothers family all the time.
I don’t think the tense changes whther you’re quoting Morris or not. I mean, if Morris says “I have to take” (tenho que lavar), that’s different than “he has to take” (tem que levar), but that’s how most romance languages work and is not unusual at all. “Have” (ter) is a special verb of maybe a dozen common ones or so that doesn’t conjugate the same as most verbs however, same with “go”, “be”, “know”, etc.
I wouldn’t call it “tense,” as it has nothing to do with time. It’s definite vs indefinite conjugation. So, for a simple example, there is látom/látok (“to see”)
Látok egy macskát. (“I see a cat.”) Látom a macskàt. (“I see the cat.”)
To break it down:
Látok (látni, “to see”, indefinite conjugation) egy (a/one) macska (“cat”) + t (accusative noun ending, also changes preceding vowel to á in this case.)
Látom (látni, “to see”, definite conjugation) a (the) macska (“cat”) + t (accusative noun ending, also changes preceding vowel to á in this case.)
And, if you want to drill a little farther, látni can be broken up into lát + ni, the infinitive marker in Hungarian.
