Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Wed like to thank Blint, Dani and Matyi for their invaluable contributions that became more profane and useful the more we drank. Many thanks to our Hungarian editor, Szilvi Finli, who helped to fine-tune the complexities of Hungarian slang. And special thanks to Kelly Reed, Alice Riegert and everyone at Ulysses Press who made it possible for us to spend the last eight months researching all the ways to say blow job in Hungarian and get paid to do it. For this we are eternally grateful.
USING THIS BOOK
Why Dirty Hungarian?
If your experience with Hungarian is limited to Jennifer Garner speaking it with a lousy accent in Season 2 of Alias, youve already been exposed to more Hungarian than most people outside of Hungary. Face it, no one raced to register for high school Hungarian classes, so we assume you know as much about the language as you do about why you cant get laid on Saturday night, something we guarantee youll have no trouble with in Budapest provided you use this book correctly and dont act like too much of an asshole.
Hungarian is an obscure yet delightful language of which Hungarians are very proud. With its melodic and expressive qualities it can make you fall in love with anyone who speaks it to you, even if hes telling you to go fuck yourself because youve been pawing his girlfriend at the bar for the past hour.
Learning a new language and being able to communicate with people of other cultures and countries can be exciting. But beware the pitfalls. A few years ago, around New Years Eve, Rka and I were at the Metropolitan Opera House when we found ourselves standing next to two Hungarian women on vacation in New York. Rka chatted with them, and when it came time to leave I wanted to show off what little Hungarian I knew. So I smiled and attempted to say Boldog j vet! (Happy New Year!). Except what I said was Baszd meg seggfej! (Fuck you asshole!)
What happened next wasnt the kind of excitement we were hoping for.
We dont want you to accidentally get your ass kicked, but if you want to deliberately tell someone to go fuck themselves, then Dirty Hungarian is the book for you, because Hungarian has more ways to piss people off than any other language on earth. So have no fear, because Dirty Hungarian walks you through accurate and up-to-date everyday phrases and slang that will have you swearing like a drunken Hungarian soccer fan in no time. Subjects and situations are arranged in easy-to-search chapters and phrases are generally English first followed by the Hungarian translation.
Remember, this book is primarily slang. Dont use it to buy tomatoes from the elderly women at the produce markets lest you get a stink eye thatll melt you into your shoes. Make sure youre in the appropriate situation before you pull out the big guns. Unlike the French (who really are assholes), Hungarians are extremely patient with foreigners who try to speak Hungarian (no matter how much you fuck it up), so be brave. And once you do get the hang of it let er rip. Because nothing is as dirty as Dirty Hungarian.
Understanding Hungarian grammar
Forget it. You wont. Heres why: Hungarian is an agglutinative, phonemic, Urgic language that employs various affixesincluding circumfixesto illuminate a words usage, uncommon palatal stops, and never uses the genitive case, preferring the dative case in all situations.
Got that?
OK, we dont know what the fuck all that means either, but we do know that not even Hungarians understand Hungarian grammar. And if youre being honest, you dont really understand English grammar either, right? However, in the interest of cross-cultural linguistic comprehension (translation: the editor made us do it), were still going to clue you in on some of the important ways Hungarian differs from English.
GENDER
The first thing you should know is that Hungarian doesnt use gender-specific pronouns. If you want to say She has the best ass or He has the best ass, you would use the gender neutral as in Az segge a legjobb (He/She has the best ass) but youre still left with the problem of anyone knowing who youre referring to, assuming theres more than one person and two different genders in the general direction youre referencing. Hungarian solves this by using nouns: That guy has the best ass (A fick segge a legjobb) or That girl has the best ass (A lny segge a legjobb), and whereas English subsequently uses he and she as a second reference in a sentence to someone already identified, Hungarian ignores this little bit of linguistic illumination altogether because at this point Hungarians assume you know who the fuck theyre talking about.
This lack of gender pronouns is why a Hungarian man speaking English will often refer to his wife as he, the same way his wife will frequently refer to him as she. Its not some oddball psycho-sexual gender-switching identity issue; theyre just not used to the pronouns.
WORD ORDER
You should also know that Hungarian indicates emphasis and meaning by the word order of the sentence and not, like English, with vocal inflections. For example, in English, I want to fuck you in the car has a different meaning than I want to fuck you in the car, and even though you aint getting laid with a line like that, the word order of the sentence is still the same even if what you are emphasizing is different. In Hungarian in the car or you travels to the front of the sentence because each one is the most important aspect of the sentence. So In the car I want to fuck you (A kocsiban akarlak megdugni tged) and You I want to fuck in the car (Tged akarlak megdugni a kocsiban) are the literal translations of the Hungarian, and if a Hungarian expresses these sentiments to you in Hunglish, thats probably how itll come out.
SUFFIXES
Finally, as you read the book you may wonder why Hungarian nouns frequently look different from sentence to sentence. Its because Hungarian doesnt use prepositions but instead tags prepositional suffixes onto the backs of nouns and also changes the spelling of the noun to allow you to pronounce the word without fatally injuring your tongue. Lets consider the following phrases with the noun boner. In English, in all cases, your boner stays the same, but in Hungarian its like youre taking boner pills because your boner gets longer! This is because of the prepositional suffixes that are added to the end of the word.
Boner
Felll farok
My boner
Felll farkam
On my boner
Felll farkamra
Sit on my boner.
lj a felll farkamra.
Sit near my boner.
lj kzel a felll farkamhoz.
Sit farther away from my boner.
lj messzebb a felll farkamtl.
Look what comes out of my boner.
Nzd, mi jn a felll farkambl.
But not only do nouns make your boner longer, verbs also make your boner longer. For example:
Grab my boner.
Ragadd meg a felll farkamat.
If you think youre beginning to get a handle on all this, hold on to your hat, because if you thought nouns were difficult, each Hungarian verb has around 50 different conjugationssome more and some less depending on the verband we could try to explain why this is and how it works but we figure it would be less painful to sit in the corner and beat each other over the head with hockey sticks.
