Why is hungarian so difficult

With their own language! A very few hungarian people can speak Hungarian almost perfectly. And I'm talking about wrong words for the context, bad pronunciation, even worse spelling the last one makes me cry. I wanted to see what learning your own language feels like, so I took the checkpoint tests, surprisingly I failed a few times All I wanted to do with this is, if I could recommend only one thing, it will be this: try to get a "feeling" for the language, especially for the inflections.

Notice the borderline at the end of the "core" verb. I love how foreign people speak hungarian. Never give up learing it! And I hope I've got my English sentences right. Thanks for positing this! This is really helpful! I find it interesting to hear that even Hungarians struggle with Hungarian!

Your English was perfect, here are some lingots of appreciation. Thanks for your unique perspective on learning the Hungarian language! And your English is really excellent. If you don't mind a very minor correction, it involves the placement of punctuation when using quotes. In your sentence, "I never thought about what makes my first language so 'special,'" in English, one puts commas and periods inside the quotes, which doesn't seem logical, but that's standard usage.

On the other hand, a question mark or exclamation point will go outside quotes provided it's not part of the original quote. So, your sentence should read: I never thought about what makes my first language so "special.

I'm a beginner as well in Hungarian, and I have to say that this first week with the language has left me both excited and discouraged at the same time. There is a huge initial shock, much greater than any Romance language, when you first start learning Hungarian.

I feel that starting off in Spanish is like dipping your toe into the foreign language pool; starting off in Hungarian is like getting shoved right in. Wow, you have guts! I started off with Swedish, just to get myself started, and only now am I swimming in open water! Good luck with your learning! LOL Popewiny, about the "huge initial shock", which expresses my start as well. And on the other hand, the will to conquer the tree, which was very hard and exciting, like no other language as yet.

I think, it is better than any Computer game. Wow, this article is quite thorough, gathered a lot of useful information together. So far, I reckon having a lot of cases which I was already used to from Polish and from being very different from other European languages which I am still getting used to. Not being of Indo European origin does make it feel extra foreign. The word order also seems both very flexible and then suddenly, I stumble on a word order they aren't keen on. That said, I love it!

I just took it because I like to try all the new languages Duolingo gets from English or Spanish and it has been extremely fascinating. I'm even working on Memrise course to help me cope with it being extra foreign.

As I do more modules, I add more if anyone is interested:. There was another Duolingo Hungarian course on there, but it was really short and I finished it in about a week, so I started on my own. Speaking of Hungarian—Polish comparisons, Hungarian preverbs are very similar to Polish verb prefixes although Hungarian likes to detach them from the verb and move them around, unlike Polish. Considering how much you clearly love languages, you would probably like the Pimsleur language recordings.

Here on Duolingo, we have access to a rich array of vocabulary and sentences, with some pronunciation. The nice thing about Pimsleur is that it's entirely audio although I understand that newer version have workbooks, with written language as well, but I haven't used these , so you get to practice the language solely by listening to native speakers and speaking.

It gives you an entirely different perspective on the language, one that complements Duolingo well, IMO. I've personally used Pimsleur extensively, and it's helped my spoken ability in French, Portuguese, Russian and Irish immensely. I have no interest in trying to sell the product -- I'm just a consumer myself although I despise that label -- but I think for someone who's serious about learning languages, even if just a hobby, Pimsleur is a great product.

Only the tree structure and weird sentences on Duolingo make Hungarian look hard, as well as the rumors. Sometimes I think it is a conspiracy of Hungarians wanting to keep their monopoly on their language.

The language itself has some peculiarities, but is not harder that Russian for example, in many respects even easier. Yeah, I thin that's what scared me the mots. I saw things like "Choices 7" and was like "why does a skill about choices need to be divided into 7 sections??

Russian was way harder at level 4 in my opinion. Nevertheless, when I was a student of English as a second language in the U. I saw many Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Middle eastern students and others really struggling with the language because of the sharp differences in grammar and vocabulary respective to their own languages.

By the way I also fell "head over heels" with the mighty Hungarian language when i first encountered it written and spoken. Thank you! I am about to learn the singular verbs skill, and though it seemed daunting, it actually seems quite logical!

I think I will take your advice, and think of it as unique! I don't really understand why some people gives downvotes for personal opinions in a topic like this. May I suggest them to not throwing -1s? I am native Hungarian, living and working in Hungary, and I kept thinking that my language is extra hard. Now I think that Hungarian is difficult a bit, yes, but not so extremely hard.

Hungarian has a rather different way of thinking than Indo-European languages. This is tricky, but quite logical. Try to find out the logic, and you will like being switched to "Hungarian is easy" mode. At least in some aspects. Hungarians tend to speak in overly complex sentences. This is a kind of tradition. Use sentences with more than two clauses and you'll be considered educated since some hundreds of years.

But don't let it fool you! Use simple sentences, tell your thoughts in separate sentences, and it will be far easier. Even this course has this trap, that's why it has so many long and twisted samples. I agree that it would be better to shorten them and change to something useful. This is the hardest part for professional translators who translate from Hungarian to English—just see some odd-sounding travel teasers ;.

I thought not! Ready to get started with localization? Shira Pik-Nathan Technical translation involves translating documents related to science, technology, or any other technically-packed subject. Everything Translation October 4 , 6 min Localization Vs. Translation: Key Differences Shira Pik-Nathan Though their end goal is essentially the same - to transform content to another language - translation and localization have a few key differences that set them apart.

Also, while translation has Everything Translation September 30 , 5 min How to Choose the Best Translation Company Shira Pik-Nathan With the growing recognition of the importance of translation and localization, there are more translation companies out there than ever before, making it difficult to decide which to choose.

When choosing a Because they aren't actually related, similarities are more coincidental, but they aren't that far off. The absolute easiest part of Hungarian conjugation is the fact that it is basically based around just three verb tenses; past, present, future. Any other European language will have past perfect, pluperfect, etc. All conjugations are very consistent and there are way less irregular verbs than there are in many other languages. The one thing that does indeed take some getting used to is separating the definite and indefinite conjugation, which doesn't exist in other European languages.

Oh sorry, Hungarian doesn't have grammatical genders. Hungarian is pretty much as good as English here! If the noun ends in a vowel then it gets an accent and if it's a possessive, it becomes an i before the ending possessive letter.

That's about it. This is what usually intimidates people the most; since it's an unrelated language it simply has too many words that are totally different. Usually if someone wants to really intimidate you, they'll give some obscure term that shows how big the words can get , but this is the exception rather than the rule. Keep in mind that prepositions and possessives go at the end, but get attached to the word rather than coming with a space.

It takes some getting used to, but it's not that bad. Keep in mind that it's just a different way to think about forming words. When you immediately go to cry-baby mode and complain about how it's not the same as in English, then you're missing the point entirely.

You're learning a foreign language because it's different! If everything was the same as English it wouldn't be a foreign language. Go with the flow rather than crying about it. Accepting the differences rather than constantly complaining about them is the best way to get through them quicker. Words have a vowel agreement structure that actually helps with the musicality of the language. This was a little easier for me to get used to because Irish has a similar vowel agreement structure in spelling words, but it's very logical.

It's different and takes some getting used to, but the basic rules behind it are easy. I like to remind people when they take on any language that they are usually starting with hundreds or thousands of words already; it's impossible to start any language off from absolute scratch because there are always some features that resemble whatever you are coming from, especially vocabulary.

Hungarian is no exception. It may be from a different language family, but being located in Europe means it took on many loan words from its neighbours and if you familiarise yourself with this list you'll have a nice wee head start. The list could go on and on, and it does! While this is a great start to get you into the flow of saying something , they are clearly not the more typical words you would be using, but those are formed with incredible consistency.

When you have a good memory technique , learning all the new vocabulary will come much easier to you.