Hungarian: what sets it apart, and how long it takes

A Uralic language surrounded on all sides by Indo-European ones, gluing endings onto words until they become sentences.

FamilyUralic › Hungarian

ScriptLatin

Speakers13M 12M native · 1M second

Weeks to a working level44 Rated at 44 weeks and usually named with Finnish at the hard end of the group. Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.

The first hundred words cover45.8% and the first thousand 69.0%

What sets it apart

Eighteen cases, depending on who is counting, which is more than any other language in Europe.
Vowels come in two teams and the endings change to match, so the same case has several shapes.
The verb changes depending on whether the object is definite or not: látok I see something, látom I see it.
It arrived in central Europe around 895 AD with the Magyars and has stayed unrelated to everything within a thousand kilometres.
Family names come first, as in Chinese and Japanese, which is unusual in Europe.

What it opens

Eighteen cases, vowel harmony, and no relatives in any direction for a thousand kilometres. The language Europe keeps as proof that Indo-European is optional. Budapest's thermal baths and ruin bars are the brochure; the real prize is a nation that treats anyone attempting Hungarian as a hero.

Words with no translation

pihentagyú

PI-hent-od-yoo

Rested-brained: the person who comes up with the brilliantly absurd idea

rested-brained

The logic is that only someone who has slept properly could think of something that stupid and that good.
Hungarians use it for the wordplay nobody saw coming, the solution that should not work, the prank with too much planning behind it.
Said with admiration, almost always.

All the untranslatable words →

Next to its neighbours

Where Hungarian parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.

Hungarian vs Finnish → Hungarian vs Estonian →

Where to practise it

Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak Hungarian with.

The Hungarian Passepartout is not out yet

Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.

Leaving takes one click.

Stories in Hungarian

Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.

Hungarian in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →