Hungarian or Magyar (sounds like Mawdyar) is spoken by approximately 14 million people world wide (11 million in Hungary). The Hungarians will be the first to agree with you that Hungarian is a difficult language to learn.
The British Foreign Office studied British diplomats and embassy staff who had taken language training and found that they had the most difficulty with Hungarian. This doesn't mean that Hungarian is the most difficult language in the world but it is so different from English that it is difficult for an English speaker to learn. I have friends who have learned both Russian and Hungarian, and they had considerably more difficulty with the Hungarian despite the fact that Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and Hungarian uses the Roman alphabet .
The U.S. Department of State classifies languages in three categories and Hungarian is in Catagory II. Asian languages and Arabic are in Catagory III--the most difficult.
Linguists classify Hungarian as a Finno-Ugric language having similarities to Finnish, Estonian and Lappish but Hungarian is not close enough to these other languages to be understood by them. There are two small people groups in Siberia that have a language most similar to Hungarian.
Hungarian relies heavily on suffixes and prefixes adding these to all nouns as they are used in a sentence. Even though there is no gender, the grammar is complex. Nouns can have as many as 18 cases. Adjectives have three forms. Every Hungarian verb has two conjugations, three moods, and three persons. There is a 4-tiered system for expressing levels of politeness.
One example: in English we say he or she reads the book; I, you or they read the book--two forms of the verb. In Hungarian the word for read changes with each pronoun--I, you singular, you plural, you formal, he, and they. Then there are two different verbs for read, depending on whether you are reading something specific or non-specific (i.e. I read books versus, I read The Count of Monte Christo).
Friends of mine who have gone through intensive study of Hungarian find that it takes over a year to feel comfortable with the language. And almost no foreign speaker can ever hope to speak it without accent. A few of the things we have difficulty with are the slight variations in the long and short vowel sounds, some of the consonents like gy and ly, and with the fact that every word is stressed on the first syllabal. Just like we can identify Europeans for the difficulty in pronouncing the English th sound, Hungarians identify us by our difficulty in remembering that the Hungarian s sounds like sh. For example, the city is pronounced Budapesht.
A Humorous Mistake
One afternoon our land lady's dog was asleep on the lawn and as I passed by I thought I said in Hungarian "The dog is tired." Instead, I said, "The dog is a chicken butt." She found this quite humorous and asked my permission to share it with her family!
The British Foreign Office studied British diplomats and embassy staff who had taken language training and found that they had the most difficulty with Hungarian. This doesn't mean that Hungarian is the most difficult language in the world but it is so different from English that it is difficult for an English speaker to learn. I have friends who have learned both Russian and Hungarian, and they had considerably more difficulty with the Hungarian despite the fact that Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet and Hungarian uses the Roman alphabet .
The U.S. Department of State classifies languages in three categories and Hungarian is in Catagory II. Asian languages and Arabic are in Catagory III--the most difficult.
Linguists classify Hungarian as a Finno-Ugric language having similarities to Finnish, Estonian and Lappish but Hungarian is not close enough to these other languages to be understood by them. There are two small people groups in Siberia that have a language most similar to Hungarian.
Hungarian relies heavily on suffixes and prefixes adding these to all nouns as they are used in a sentence. Even though there is no gender, the grammar is complex. Nouns can have as many as 18 cases. Adjectives have three forms. Every Hungarian verb has two conjugations, three moods, and three persons. There is a 4-tiered system for expressing levels of politeness.
One example: in English we say he or she reads the book; I, you or they read the book--two forms of the verb. In Hungarian the word for read changes with each pronoun--I, you singular, you plural, you formal, he, and they. Then there are two different verbs for read, depending on whether you are reading something specific or non-specific (i.e. I read books versus, I read The Count of Monte Christo).
Friends of mine who have gone through intensive study of Hungarian find that it takes over a year to feel comfortable with the language. And almost no foreign speaker can ever hope to speak it without accent. A few of the things we have difficulty with are the slight variations in the long and short vowel sounds, some of the consonents like gy and ly, and with the fact that every word is stressed on the first syllabal. Just like we can identify Europeans for the difficulty in pronouncing the English th sound, Hungarians identify us by our difficulty in remembering that the Hungarian s sounds like sh. For example, the city is pronounced Budapesht.A Humorous Mistake
One afternoon our land lady's dog was asleep on the lawn and as I passed by I thought I said in Hungarian "The dog is tired." Instead, I said, "The dog is a chicken butt." She found this quite humorous and asked my permission to share it with her family!
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