Hungarian language

When I visited Budapest in 2015, I liked the Hungarian language so much that I started learning it.

Hungarian isn’t similar to any other language. For me, that uniqueness was a plus — I wasn’t interested in learning, say, Polish, which is similar to my native tongue but still different. Learning by focusing on the differences isn’t very exciting.¹

Hungarian is often described as one of the most difficult languages in the world, and I was curious to see whether it’s true.

• Hungarian sounds like this:

• The alphabet has 44 letters. There are long vowels (á, é, í, ó, ú), unique letters such as ő and ű, and combinations like gy or ly that are considered letters as well.

• Words are pronounced very close to how they’re written. Once you know the alphabet, you can read most words more or less correctly. If the word one were Hungarian, it would be pronounced /ˈone/ rather than /wʌn/. There are almost no surprises or weird transformations, unlike in English, where “colonel” is pronounced like “kernel”.

• The stress always falls on the first syllable. It helps with pronunciation a lot.

• The letter a sounds surprising — it’s closer to o than to a (hear it on Wikipedia). The letter s sounds like the English sh (so Budapest is pronounced “Budapesht” in Hungarian).

• Word formation is fascinating. It often works like LEGO bricks, allowing you to build vocabulary much faster. Look:

  • szám — number, figure
  • számít — (he/she/it) calculates
  • gép — machine
  • számítógép — computer

  Or:

  • vas — iron
  • út — road
  • vas + út = vasút — railway
  • áll — (he/she/it) stands
  • -más — (noun-forming suffix)
  • vasútállomás — railway station

• The base form of a verb is not the infinitive (do) but the third-person singular (does):

  • vár — he/she/it waits (also you wait when addressing one person formally).
  • várni — to wait (-ni makes it the infinitive).

• There’s no grammatical gender. He, she, and it are all expressed with the same word — ő. This word is rarely used, though. You can simply say vár (“waits”). Who’s waiting will be clear from context — or not 😄

• Here are a few words that are spelled and sound the same but have different meanings. There’s something poetic about them:

  • nap — sun / day
  • tud — knows / is able to
  • hallgat — listens / is silent
  • oldal — side / page

• A sibling is called testvér. Test means body, and vér means blood. There are also specific words for older brother (báty), younger brother (öcs), older sister (nővér), and younger sister (húg).

• Hungarian has vowel harmony. Many suffixes have different forms to fit the vowels of the word:

  • lámpa → lámpán (lamp → on the lamp)
  • ház → házon (house → on the house)
  • kép → képen (picture → on the picture)

  Képen (roughly pronounced “kay-pen”) sounds better than képn or képon.

• When people talk about how complex Hungarian is, they often mention its surprising number of grammatical cases — I’ve seen anything from 18 to 25. It turned out not to be scary at all. They actually make a lot of sense and solve familiar problems in a slightly different way.

  Let’s take the word ház (house) as an example:

  • ház — house
  • házba — into the house
  • házhoz — to the house / toward the house
  • háznál — at / near the house
  • házból — from the house

  So, instead of prepositions (in, to, from, near), suffixes are used. It makes sense — the subject comes first, and then the details are added.

  There are also grammatical cases that aren’t related to prepositions, but the logic is the same. For example, -kor expresses time: tíz — ten, tízkor — at ten o’clock.

  The most complicated thing about Hungarian cases is their names. Adessive, allative, ablative, instrumental-comitative… You don’t need to worry about that at all.

• Suffixes in Hungarian can work miracles within a single word:

  • vár — waits
  • várok — I wait
  • várlak — I wait for you
  • vártalak — I waited for you
  • várnálak — I would wait for you

  And that’s not the limit. There’s also the -hat/-het suffix, which expresses possibility or permission:

  • várhat — can wait
  • várhatok — I can wait
  • várhatlak — I can wait for you
  • várhattalak — I could have waited for you

• Hungarian uses different quotation marks. For example, in English it’s “We met at the ‘Black Cat’ café,” while in Hungarian it’s „A »Fekete Macska« kávéházban találkoztunk.”

  By the way, »these quotes« are called lúdláb (goose’s feet), and „these quotes” are called macskaköröm (cat’s claws). Isn’t that cute?

• Dates start with the year and are separated by dots and spaces: 2025. 10. 17.

I started learning Hungarian without any specific goal — I simply fell in love with the language. I hadn’t planned to move to Hungary or to any Hungarian-speaking region. But I knew one thing: if something is this exciting, you should follow it.

If I had looked for a goal, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the learning process as much. And there were some nice side effects:

• I took Hungarian lessons with a tutor, and they were a wonderful distraction from the real world. Everything was so new and so interesting — each lesson felt like a journey to a different universe. I’m very thankful to Julia Makarchuk-Borisova for teaching me.

• Learning languages is a great way to train your brain and memory. I’m a fan of mnemonic rules and often invent my own. For example, I used to confuse hideg and meleg — cold and hot. Then I came up with a phrase hideg híd (“cold bridge”) and remembered it forever. It reminds me of how I used to mix up even and odd in English — I was saved by a mnemonic: even has even number of letters, while odd has odd number of letters.

• The vast majority of useful information about Hungarian is written in English, and exploring it helped me improve my English as well. I listened to the Let’s Learn Hungarian podcast, browsed Wiktionary a lot, and read blogs in English.

I paused learning Hungarian after moving to another city, shortly after receiving my A2-level certificate. But every time I see or hear Hungarian, I miss it, and try to learn a little bit again.

Here’s a song for those who made it to the end — one of my favorites: