How to Teach Yourself Hungarian

Because Hungarian is such a unique language, it can seem intimidatingly strange and complicated to would-be learners. In reality, though, it's a very orderly language with relatively few grammatical exceptions, so it's not too hard to learn Hungarian without a teacher. If you want to teach yourself Hungarian, follow these steps and you can start having simple conversations within a month or so.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Hungarian phrase book
• Hungarian dictionary
• Textbook with explanations of Hungarian grammar
• Texts in Hungarian
• Audio in Hungarian

1. Set your learning goals. Do you just need some basic "survival" phrases or will you need specialized vocabulary for your field of work? How fast do you want to learn Hungarian?

2. Get an understanding of the Hungarian alphabet. Make sure you know how diacritical ("accent") marks affect the sounds of vowels and how to pronounce combinations like "sz" and "gy." When you're trying to teach yourself Hungarian, it's vital to listen to spoken Hungarian to get a feel for the sounds.

3. Learn some basic nouns and adjectives. Hungarian has a lot of compound words, so the more basic words you know, the easier it becomes to figure out the meaning of longer words. If you know "év" means "year" and "szak" means "time period," you might guess (correctly) that "évszak" means "season." Also pay attention to typical word endings such as "-as"/"-es" and "-an"/"-en" because these will help you identify what part of speech a word is.

4. Learn some basic verbs like "lenni" (to be) and "menni" (to go), quite a few of which are irregular. Make sure you know how to conjugate them in the simple past, present, and future, but don't worry about other tenses just yet.

5. Study Hungarian grammar such as post-positions, possessives and more advanced verb forms. Depending on your experience with languages, concepts like vowel harmony or post-positions might be confusing as you first learn Hungarian, but with practice they'll become second nature.

6. Develop your knowledge. Once you have a grasp on the basics, you can teach yourself Hungarian simply by reading and listening to native Hungarian, identifying words and grammar structures that you don't know, then going to your textbook and looking up more information on these topics.

7. Practice with native speakers. Don't be shy; Hungarians are very appreciative of foreigners' attempts to learn their language. Even if you can't afford a ticket to Budapest, you can practice and learn Hungarian without a teacher through online language exchange programs and even Hungarian-language forums.

Tips & Warnings

• You'll reach fluency faster by learning phrases instead of individual words. By doing this you'll also be memorizing examples that will help you understand grammar concepts better.
• Don't get too hung up on trying to use perfect grammar. There are some things, like knowing when to use the transitive or the intransitive version a verb, that very few foreigners understand perfectly.
• As you teach yourself Hungarian, be careful when trying to figure out the meaning of a word by breaking it into parts. For instance, you may know that "jegy" means "ticket" and the ending "-es" marks an adjective, but "jegyes" means "fiancé," not "ticketed."

Resources

• Get free Hungarian lessons at MagyarOra.com.
• HungaroTips.com has games and puzzles to help you learn.
• A free English/Hungarian dictionary is available at Sztaki.hu.
• Find a language exchange partner at MyLanguageExchange.com.
• HungarianBookStore.com offers more than just books.
• Listen to Hungarian radio at HungarianRadio.com.
• Practice your Hungarian at one of these forums.