Out of curiousity, have any of the people here who have seriously studied Hungarian ever lived in Hungary for an extended period of time?
Once I had a group of word a day apps for Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish, just so I could see if I could notice similarities. There were not many obvious ones. Finnish is my second language (English is my first). If I were living in Europe, I would want to learn some Hungarian just for traveling there. I met some Hungarians at a local Finnish/Swedish bakery, and they seemed to think that Finnish was hard to learn, though it doesn’t have as many cases as Hungarian.
I’m learning Japanese now, though the Finnish Worddive app. I’m still just accumulating basic vocabulary, and haven’t gotten much in the way of grammar yet. Now that’s a different language. Verb forms change according to relative status of speaker and spoken to (or spoken about), and formality of the situation one is in or speaking about. I do not expect to attain any sort of fluency, but simply want to satisfy some curiosity about the way it works.
I haven’t been to Hungary. I did attend Hungary Day at the Hungarian embassy in DC, on the invitation of my Hungarian teacher, when I took a Hungarian class through the local public school adult extension system. A kid performed Bartók’s “Bear Dance” on the piano.
On a business trip to St. Louis, I stopped in for dinner at the ISKCON restaurant, Govinda’s on Lindell Blvd. The young married couple working the cash register mentioned to another customer that they had just immigrated from Hungary through their membership in ISKCON. As I was leaving, I waved to them and said, “Jó éjszakat kívánok, barátok!” They were astonished to hear their language unexpectedly. So I had to stay a moment longer and explain how I had always liked the Hungarian language and tried to learn it. They got so happy! 
They must have been so happy to hear their language.
I would like to visit Hungary. When I was in second grade, we read a book called The Good Master, set in pre-WWI Hungary, on a ranch, with gorgeous illustrations. It evoked a long gone time and way of life.
Estonian is very similar to Finnish, and I got by in Estonia very well, speaking Finnish, even before the fall of of Soviet Union. Unless I ran into a Russian who had been resettled there. I’ve also been able to muddle through some bits of written Saami language I’ve come across, because of its similarity to Finnish. Speaking is another matter entirely.
Already answered, but they walked. One foot in front of another. It’s like the Israelites taking forty years to get to the Promised Land when in reality it’d take a few months. A couple weeks without the kids and the sheep.
I never “seriously studied it” per se, but I did live there from July '98 to Nov '03.
Didn’t they probably ride horses rather than walk?
If they had horses. Many would ride in carts (where the road allowed for it), mules… or walked beside them. If it made more sense to put your load on the mule and walk, you walked. And the carts didn’t go much faster than a person on foot. But whether the feet in question were human ones or hoofed ones, they walked.
For those of us who take paved roads for granted it’s difficult to understand how much harder and slower it was to move with carts and beasts of burden, more so when you were moving through dense vegetation or marshes.
Don’t take this the wrong way, as I believe that learning solely for the sake of learning is often time & effort well spent, but it just seems like such a random area of study for someone who isn’t looking to apply the aquired language skills at some point.
Again, I don’t mean to sound flip, but you do get that Hungary is a really, really inexpensive country to spend time in for people with U$D to spend, right?
I fully understand that flights over from the U.S, are not cheap, but once you get there, you can live like a Queen for $60 or $70 per day, including a nice if not luxurious 3 star hotel room, excellent meals & drinks out every day and night (in particular, Hungarian wine is excellent, and a glass in any but the most upscale, tourist-centric cafe or pub is always going to run less than one dollar) taxis, etc., and those prices are in the heart of Budapest, any smaller, less touristed town will be considerably less than that.
Hungarians are generally warm, lovely people, I am sure with your knowlege of their language (which they fully understand is both difficult and uncommon in other places) you would be treated very, very well.
Just FYI, learning languages and learning about languages of all kinds is Johanna’s particular field of study.
That’s not quite true, but wine is still cheap by US standards. Typically, you can expect 2dl of the cheap wine to cost around $1.50-$2USD (as of last year) at the local, non-tourist places. Something around 200-300 HUF a dl is typical. At the upscale places, you’re paying at least double or triple that.
It’s still pretty affordable by US standards, but Budapest is not what I would call dirt cheap. I’m looking at the menu of a local Hungarian restaurant I used to frequent, and main dishes run $6-$8, where the same ones at a local diner here in Chicago would cost $8-$12. A single subway ticket bought on the spot is 450HUF, or $1.60. In Chicago, it’s $2.25. When I first moved there in the late 90s, a subway ticket was something like US$0.30. Frankly, I don’t know how Hungarians afford living there now.
So, yes, cheaper, and probably about two thirds of what it would cost here, and certainly cheaper than Western Europe (which all seems more expensive than here in the US).
Maybe you’re right, I was last there in August, but I know that at a little pub that seemed to have a mix of locals and tourists located 50 yards from my hotel (which was a 2 minute walk from the Great Synagogue) a glass of wine (maybe a touch smaller than a typical American pour?) was 300 HUF, a beer was a bit less (250 HUF?) and that my meals were usually under 1500, and while I am not a huge “foodie” I ate very well, including the hands-down best Mexican food I have ever had in Europe, which was a bit of a “splurge” at something like $6.00 total, including with a bottle of German Paulaner to wash it down.
Either way, Budapest is (to me at least) an extremely budget friendly city, especially compared to other major European capitols.
Wow. That does seem cheap to me. Beer I remember being closer to 500HUF at my usual local hangouts (for a 0.5L), but I’m sure you can find a cheap Köbanyai or similar for much lower. There’s certainly deals to be found if you know where to look.
I agree, there is a surprising amount of passable Tex-Mex in Budapest. Started with the Iguana in the 90s, and then expanded with Arriba and its knockoffs around 2004 or so. Best Tex-Mex I’ve had in Europe, absolutely. The fact that I could get Mexican-style chorizo in Budapest in 1999 just blew my mind.
Let’s suppose you already know some Indo-European language(s). Is there some reason why Hungarian would be significantly more difficult to learn than any other “alien” language like Arabic, Chinese, or Sumerian? Or let’s say Basque, to pick a language written with a Latin alphabet.
I <3 heart this.
C’est vrai. Az igaz.
Those are all over the map. Off the bat I think Sumerian would be the hardest to learn, because there isn’t much of a community of Sumerian users to practice with! Apart from Dr. Ammondt, who raps in Sumerian. That, and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
The other languages you listed are incommensurate for difficulty, as far as I can tell, because the difficulties are apples, oranges, and lychees. Each is difficult in its own way. Chinese has the thousands of characters to memorize and training the ear to extract meanings from tones. Basque has unfamiliar grammatical structures and two different /s/ phonemes. Basque etymology, unlike Chinese, has incorporated tons of Spanish/Latinate loanwords.
Of them all, Arabic has given me the most rewarding experience learning. Arabic has a few unfamiliar phonemes that will take practice to master. Its writing system is not as scary as first appears, once you get started learning it. Arabic grammar parallels that of Indo-European languages in the broad outlines, but the engineering of it is completely different. The verb paradigms are elaborated in great depth starting from a simple sequence of three consonants. The conjugations are highly complex but are also completely regular within their complexity. That means it takes a lot of oopmh on the learner’s part to broach the verb paradigms, but that once you’ve learned them, you’ve got it all down, because unlike in Indo-European (and less so for Hungarian), there are no irregular inflections!
I’ve often considered while making goulash that the distance between goulash and chili is a short one indeed.
Yes, I’ve noted that in the past, as well. A Texas bowl of red is very similar to a goulash or pörkölt, basically stemming from the idea of beef + red pepper (paprika/chiles). And no beans in Hungarian goulash, either! (Well, unless you get babgulyás, which is “bean goulash.” Almost made that today, but settled on another Hungarian classic, instead: Jókai bableves.)