2023-04-22 17:00:57
I keep hearing how complicated the Hungarian language is and how difficult it is to learn.
But the more I deal with it, the clearer it becomes to me how logical this language actually is. And how nice too! Where else is there something like vowel harmony, in which the vowels of word components are adapted to each other so that they sound harmonious and are easier to pronounce.
Back to your own school days
I wanted to know all this in more detail and therefore completed a four-week intensive course in Budapest. The four hours of group lessons a day were exhausting, but a lot of fun. Full of nostalgia, they reminded me of my school days: lessons in the morning, homework in the afternoon and then hitting the slopes. Well, with a pensioner, the latter is limited to a few concert visits and exploring the rich gastronomic offer.
One of the things that makes Hungarian so difficult for many is the fact that there are so many short words that consist of only three or four letters and are therefore easily confused. Just one forgotten accent can completely change the meaning of a word. These short words are often compounded into longer ones and given a new meaning. Some things are really strange. For example, parts of the body are also put together linguistically in this way. So leg is called “láb”, the head “fej” and a finger is a “ujj”. The foot, the “lábfej” is the “head of the leg” and the toe, “lábujj” is the “finger of the leg”.
Consistent and simple
It is nice that the pronunciation is very clear and consistent, each word is stressed on the first syllable. Many things are even particularly simple, such as the formation of the past or the future, or that there is only one gender. Incidentally, the fact that Hungary does not use the typical German gender obsession is not the fault of the “evil Orbán”, but is due to the gender-neutral language.
Which, by the way, can also sound very funny if similar-sounding fragments of words are strung together. Sometimes something like “gyerekeiknek” comes out (for their children). One of my favorite words is “csütörtök” (Thursday) – not to be confused with sütőtök (pumpkin) – and “diótörő” (nutcracker).
The many different appendages are striking. A friend once complained that she only ever heard ből, bal, ről or nök, nek, nak! But that is the big difference to the languages we are more familiar with, such as English, French or Spanish. Namely that in Hungarian grammatical constructions such as prepositions, tenses, cases or possessive pronouns are not known as individual words, but as so-called suffixes that are attached to the noun, like wagons to a locomotive. Although this makes the train longer and longer, it only seems confusing until you learn where to separate the individual cars.
The advantage of this is that a longer German sentence becomes a much shorter one in Hungarian. The fact that words are often left out when the meaning of the statement is clear without them also contributes to brevity. That’s what I particularly like about Hungarian: instead of tedious, time-consuming chatter, here you concentrate on the essentials!
The author is a qualified physicist, but then made music and love of language his profession and became a cabaret artist. In the past 40 years he has been on stage more than 6,000 times and has been a guest in numerous television programs. He also wrote six books. Since 2020 he has been living with his wife near Lake Balaton. You can find out more about Detlev Schönauer in this BZ interview.
#Ich #lerne #ungarisch #learning #Hungarian..