Learn Hungarian for Travel, Work and Study

Hungarian is written in the Latin alphabet with a generous set of accents — á, é, í, ó, ö, ő, ú, ü, ű — that mark long vowels and are not optional: “kor” is an age, “kór” a disease, “kör” a circle. The spelling is almost perfectly regular, with one notorious crossing: “s” is pronounced sh and “sz” is pronounced s, so Budapest is “Budapesht” and “szia” is “see-ya”. “C” is ts, “cs” is ch, “zs” is the French j, and “gy” is a soft d-y sound that has no English equivalent and appears in the word for Hungarian itself, “magyar”. Every word is stressed on its first syllable, which makes the language sound even and emphatic.

The grammar works by suffixes, and the suffixes obey vowel harmony: each ending exists in two or three versions, and the word's own vowels decide which is used — “in” is “-ban” after “ház” but “-ben” after “kert”, a garden. The eighteen or so case endings mostly do the work of English prepositions, and the real difficulty lies elsewhere: Hungarian verbs have two full sets of endings, one used when the object is definite — “I see the house” — and one when it is not — “I see a house” — and the choice must be made in every sentence. Possession is marked on the thing owned, so “my house” is one word, and there is a suffix that turns a surname into a whole family: “Kovácsék”, the Kovács household.

Address is layered. “Te” is for family, friends, children and increasingly colleagues; “ön” is the polite form, used with the third-person verb, for strangers, officials and business; “maga” is a middle form that can sound curt. Children and some men still greet older women with “csókolom”, “I kiss it”, meaning the hand, and the title follows the surname — “Kovács úr”, Mr Kovács — because the surname comes first in Hungarian names, as the year comes first in Hungarian dates. “Szia” serves for both hello and goodbye among people on “te” terms.

Standard Hungarian is unusually uniform and the dialects are mild; a learner who understands Budapest understands Debrecen and Pécs. Beyond the border, Hungarian is the daily language of large communities in Transylvania in Romania, in southern Slovakia, in the Vojvodina region of Serbia and in western Ukraine, where it keeps a few older words and a slightly different music. Its relatives Finnish and Estonian are too distant for mutual understanding — the kinship shows in grammar rather than words — and no other language in Europe helps with it.

For an English speaker Hungarian is a long language in the same group as Finnish, Russian and Polish — about 1,100 classroom hours before professional working proficiency, by the US Foreign Service Institute's estimate — and the length comes from vocabulary rather than sound: nearly every word is new, and each must be learned with the way its stem changes before an ending. Against that, pronunciation is settled in a fortnight, the grammar has few true exceptions, and progress once under way is steady. Learners report a long first plateau and then a sudden ability to read, which comes when the suffixes stop looking like noise.

Budapest answers a visitor in English wherever visitors go and wherever anyone is under forty; the older generation often has German instead. Beyond the capital and beyond the tourist trade — in a provincial town, a village shop, a doctor's waiting room, any government office — Hungarian is the only language, and so is it in the paperwork of residence. The service centres of multinational companies recruit for English and the other big European languages; Hungarian firms, ministries, schools and hospitals run in Hungarian. Universities teach in Hungarian, with the medical universities running full degrees in English for foreign students and English-taught master's programmes elsewhere; a Hungarian-taught degree is preceded by a year of language.

• S is sh and sz is s: The one spelling rule foreigners never expect: Budapest is said “Budapesht”, the composer Liszt is “List”, and a learner who swaps them is instantly placed.
• Surname first, year first: Hungarians write their family name before their given name — Bartók Béla, Nagy Katalin — and their dates from year to month to day. The whole language goes from the big to the small.
• Egészségedre: “To your health”, said as cheers and after a sneeze, and so hard for visitors that Hungarians use it as a test. An old custom frowns on clinking beer glasses while saying it.
• No he, no she: “Ő” is the only third-person pronoun, so a Hungarian story can run for pages without revealing anyone's sex, and Hungarians speaking English mix up he and she for life.
• Coach, paprika, goulash: All three are Hungarian: the coach is named after the village of Kocs where the carriage was built, paprika needs no explanation, and “gulyás” was the herdsman before it was the soup.
• A family in one ending: Add “-ék” to a surname and you have the household: “Szabóék” is the Szabó family, as a unit, and “Szabóéknál” is at the Szabós' place.
• Fourteen vowels: Seven short and seven long, each pair a different letter, and the length changes the meaning: “tör” breaks, “tőr” is a dagger, “tűr” endures.

Hungarian levels follow the CEFR, and two examinations issue the certificates that count. The ECL exam was created at the University of Pécs to test Hungarian before it grew into a European consortium, and Hungarian remains its home language: it is offered from A2 to C1 at centres in Hungary and across Europe, in reading, listening, writing and speaking without a separate grammar test, and it is the certificate most foreign learners hold. The Origó exam of the language centre at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest tests Hungarian as a foreign language from B1 to C1 and is the other state-accredited certificate universities and employers accept. Hungarian universities ask for B2 before a degree taught in Hungarian, and the preparatory year that the Balassi programme and the universities run for foreign students is built to reach it.

Residence in Hungary carries no language condition: neither a residence permit nor the permanent residence card asks for Hungarian. Citizenship does, indirectly and directly. The ordinary naturalisation route requires passing an examination in constitutional basics that is set in Hungarian, so a working command of the language is a condition in practice; the simplified route for people of Hungarian descent requires knowledge of Hungarian, assessed in an interview. The first year is the slow one: it ends, for most adults in regular classes, at A2, and the B2 a university expects arrives in the second or third.

Hungarian self-study depends on three things a learner cannot do without: a dictionary that shows how a stem changes before its endings, a grammar that settles vowel harmony and the two conjugations in one clear chapter each, and a daily dose of Hungarian spoken slowly enough to separate the suffixes. Flashcards should carry whole phrases rather than bare words, because the stem in the dictionary is seldom the form heard in the street, and the public broadcaster's news, once the ear is ready, is the clearest Hungarian a learner will meet.

A tutor is worth most in Hungarian for the two conjugations and the vowel length. The definite-or-indefinite choice in every sentence turns into a reflex through talk alone, with someone who interrupts gently each time; and nobody discovers that their “kor”, “kór” and “kör” all sound alike until a Hungarian says the three back. A tutor also teaches the register — when “ön” and when “te”, how “csókolom” is used — and the hundred small politenesses that textbooks list and never drill.