Rounds Carol - Colloquial Hungarian

Hungarian is a fascinating language quite different from most other European languages. It is the westernmost member of the Finno-Ugric language family, having Finnish, Estonian and several less-well-known languages as its distant cousins. In addition to the approximately 10 million speakers in Hungary proper, several million native Hungarian speakers dwell in the neighbouring countries of Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Austria and the Ukraine.

Hungarian is challenging for the adult language learner for two main reasons: English and Hungarian share very little common vocabulary, so each new word you learn will look very different from its English counterpart. Some loan words from English and other languages are easier to recognise than others: bank, telefon, posta are some obvious ones, but until you get the knack of Hungarian spelling, words like szendvics sandwich and menedzser manager may make you pause, though their origins are clear. English has even borrowed a word from Hungarian: coach comes from kocsi (a word used nowadays in Hungarian to mean anything from coach to cars or train carriages). Although more words from other European languages are being adopted by the Hungarian language all the time, the bulk of the vocabulary is as rich, varied and home-made as Hungary's folk traditions.

With a few exceptions, the written language mostly reflects the pronunciation of words; thus, from a phonetic point of view, Hungarian is quite easy to master. It is the structure of Hungarian that is the big challenge, as it shares few common elements with the Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages of its neighbours. Hungarian is a so-called agglutinative language, meaning that several endings can be attached (glued) to a root word to change not only its meaning in a sentence but also its role. Instead of using prepositions, Hungarian adds a case ending; and instead of expressing possession with a word such as my or your, Hungarian adds an ending. You will see that your fluency in the language takes shape not only with the number of words you learn but also with how long you can make them!