I learned Hungarian late in life (2011) | Hacker News Reader

I learned Hungarian late in life (2011)

hungarianreview.com

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I learned some hungarian in my 20s. Tough language, but so beautiful.

I'd say there are some very weird things about the language. I had to wait until my second semester to be able to say "I have X". There's no such verb as "having" in hungarian, but you use possessive + being to indicate you have something. And we only learnt possessive suffixes in 2nd semester.

I'd say that something that helped a lot was that in early 2000s there wasn't that much people speaking English in Budapest. So, no cheating.

But also, trying to speak Hungarian would get people smiling at you for trying. People would say "But Hungarian is the most difficult language in the world!" (maybe not true, but I'd hear that a lot).

After a year and a half, I could communicate with my Mother in law, with some mistakes, but enough to get around and get complimented on my skills.

Couldn't continue living in Budapest, had to return to my home country in Latin America. But later in life, got the opportunity to move to Berlin. I thought "Well, I learnt Hungarian, I can learn German". How wrong I was.

Being able to cheat (Everybody speaks English) and trying to do this in your 30's is much harder.

Not only that, I guess what what made everything just not worthy was Germans giving you shit every time you make a mistake, or your 5-vowel mother language makes it hard to pronounce things. Not only that, but then if you make mistakes you get judged immediately as somebody that "didn't want to integrate". People would generalize and now, after 10 years. With 2 half-german daughters I don't want to learn the language.

Being a native speaker I never considered the example you mention, but it's definitely weird. To express "I have X" in Hungarian you would say "There is X", but X has an extra letter 'm', usually with an accent of the letter before it. "There is an apple" = "Van egy alma" "I have an apple" = "Van egy almám" As the article pointed out Hungarian language possibly has origins in Kazahstan and Mongolia, there is some similarity in the names of places to present-day Hungarian words (Alma Ata, Ulan Bator). alma = apple ata (atya) = father bator (bátor) = brave No one is quite sure as proto-Hungarians wandered the steppes and left no written notes. What we know is they spent a lot of time in Levédia, present day Ukraine and Russia by the river Volga. https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev%C3%A9dia (article in hungarian)

> Not only that, I guess what what made everything just not worthy was Germans giving you shit every time you make a mistake, or your 5-vowel mother language makes it hard to pronounce things. Not only that, but then if you make mistakes you get judged immediately as somebody that "didn't want to integrate".

This isn't my experience at all, as a non-native German speaker living in Berlin with a half German child.

> People would generalize and now, after 10 years. With 2 half-german daughters I don't want to learn the language.

Trust me, you're being judged (fairly, imo) a lot more harshly for living somewhere for a decade and not even bothering to learn the local language.

Its a lot harder to be an English-speaker living in Germany than you might think. NOBODY wants to listen to your shitty botched German (and trust me, it'll be botched for a while) and instead, almost everyone you meet will want to practice their English instead.

All it takes is a few sentences in German, though, before the judgement dissipates and the "lets take the piss out of this guy speaking German by speaking 'perfect' English at a much higher level of competence" takes over ..

It adds up though. Speak your shitty German to strangers, and you'll gain a lot more friends.

> Trust me, you're being judged (fairly, imo) a lot more harshly for living somewhere for a decade and not even bothering to learn the local language.

I had 2 years in Goethe institute. And had lessons 2 times a week at work. Kept a handbook at all times with vocabulary to repeat it in the subway. And mingled with German people to escape the expat bubble.

I'm in B1 in German standards.

But that's precisely the same judgement of "not even bothering" I normally get. After so much of that, after 3 years I just gave up.

English-as-mother-tongue speaker here, currently living in a German-speaking country, also with two kids who have been raised with both English and German spoken in our household, giving them a huge edge at school with near-perfect English scores since day one ..

My experience with the Germans not wanting to speak German with you while you stumble over everything, is simply that they want to exercise their own English, and its just not as fun for them to wait for your marble-mouthed nonsense to parse. ;) But its not, in my experience, due to any xenophobia or general prejudice - more of a fact that its a lot of fun to speak a non-native language with a native-speaker. Germans are after that "I can speak English well enough!" acknowledgement, which - unless you've really, really studied hard for it - you won't really get to experience, either, speaking German .. for a few years, I imagine.

But, its really important to keep up your skills no matter what your friends and family do to dissuade you. I'm at the point, 15 years into life in a German-speaking country, where I can speak near-flawless German with strangers consistently, but any time I try with someone who is familiar with me, it turns into an embarrassing mess .. But I encourage you to keep trying, its really fun!

> My experience with the Germans not wanting to speak German with you while you stumble over everything, is simply that they want to exercise their own English, and its just not as fun for them to wait for your marble-mouthed nonsense to parse. ;)

As a German, my reason for switching to English quickly was always along the lines of "oh no, they're struggling to communicate with me! I feel bad. Let's make it easier for everyone and switch to English".

This applies especially when talking to English native speakers, but, weirdly enough, also for others - I feel better when I also have to suffer by talking in a non-native language. Doesn't really make sense, I know :)

I've talked to other Germans about this a few times and many of them agreed that this was their way of thinking in these situations.

I get that this behavior can come across as condescending and I absolutely understand the frustration about it when trying to exercise one's German skills. So nowadays, when this happens (which is quite rare anyway), I try to just stick to German.

I'm a bit puzzled why people would learn German out of all languages anyway, apart from living here obviously, so I'm always happy when someone does.

Also, I obviously can't speak for the whole German population and sadly there's definitely some xenophobia to be found wherever you look.

Yes, its pretty clear after a decade and a half of living in a German-speaking land, as a native English speaker, that the intention of a German-native-speaker switching to English is really to be more accommodating of the struggles of the other person - but for some reason, categorically it just doesn't come off that way. Its very frustrating at times too, because the switch mid-statement shuts down my attempt at communicating in German, and thus .. I don't ever really get better.

What I suggest to all my German-speaking/English-preferring friends and colleagues, is to CORRECT the German, in a friendly way, and speak friendlier German while I'm "getting the marbles out" ..

As for learning German - its a beautiful language and there is much literature that can be enjoyed in German, which loses its feels in English translations. I have a "German/English Shakespeare" volume, which has Shakespeare in German on one side of the page, and English on the other, and this has proven to me time and again that German can be just as beautiful, befuddling, frustrating and enlightening as English. I'm really glad I raised my kids to be German/English speaking too - having an intrinsic knowledge of both languages has helped them be better speakers of them both, too.

> What I suggest to all my German-speaking/English-preferring friends and colleagues, is to CORRECT the German, in a friendly way, and speak friendlier German while I'm "getting the marbles out" ..

I've heard something different to this and I have to say that it helps in my language learning. You shouldn't correct someone who gets the language wrong, but accept anything that you understand as correct enough. If there is some possible confusion in the meaning, however, you should ask for clarification (e.g. "do you mean you're going to the movies now, or that you went to the movies yesterday?") The language learner will follow up with a different phrasing and/or with questions about grammar that will teach them more than a quickly forgotten correction.

> > My experience with the Germans not wanting to speak German with you while you stumble over everything, is simply that they want to exercise their own English, and its just not as fun for them to wait for your marble-mouthed nonsense to parse. ;)

I've seen that outside of Berlin. (Or from Germans from out of Berlin when they come and see all the "expats). Are you in Berlin?

I'm not in Berlin (Vienna) but I can confirm that in the few places outside of the bigger cities where I've encountered this phenomenon, its very common to get criticized for poor German-language skills by the townspeople, who seem to think that ones German skills should be at least on par with Germans who can speak English.

Old wounds, I guess.

> I'd say there are some very weird things about the language. I had to wait until my second semester to be able to say "I have X". There's no such verb as "having" in hungarian, but you use possessive + being to indicate you have something. And we only learnt possessive suffixes in 2nd semester.

The same is also true for Turkish:

Bende elma var = I have an apple

Bende = Ben (me) - de (possesive), elma = apple, var = exists.

Turkish also has a lot of common words with Hungarian and no gender also like in Hungarian. Even the politics look as bad as each other, hehe. Sometimes I think there must be some more connection to these 2 societies than what you can find in Wikipedia.

I speak little to none Hungarian, and a lot of Turkish, and this broken English you can read here but I disagree, learning German wasn't that hard and for all the errors I make when speaking, nobody bats an eye.

Edit: I realize you said Berlin. Oh man, what can I tell you... There, I also had hard time speaking German, and the first mistake you make they directly switch to English to be friendly. There's something like overshooting it when you are being helpful to foreigners :) I tried to order beer and said "Bier bitte!" and the waitress asked, in English, "You want a beer?", same happened when asking for directions. This never ever happens in Hessen and I sort of like it that way.

Disclaimer: Author is a person of somewhat Turkish origin living happily in Germany who also loves the Hungarian language and culture.

> The same is also true for Turkish:

Something similar in Irish:

Tá úll agam = is (an) apple at me. In this case it's the preposition "ag" that gets conjugated differently for at me, at you, at him... instead of the subject as in Turkish or the object in the Hungarian example. Agat = at you.

Or for feelings: Tá ocras orm = is hunger on me. Ort = on you.

Children learn example sentences like these early in their mandatory Irish classes, though they don't start to memorize the lists of conjugations until a few years later. This seems like a reasonable approach, but the classes are staggeringly ineffective at actually teaching the language so we must be doing something wrong.

It's interesting how often m means me, and t or d means thou, across all kinds of European languages.

> Tá úll agam = is (an) apple at me. In this case it's the preposition "ag" that gets conjugated differently for at me, at you, at him... instead of the subject as in Turkish or the object in the Hungarian example. Agat = at you.

> Or for feelings: Tá ocras orm = is hunger on me. Ort = on you.

Same, except for spelling differences, for its very close relative, Scottish Gaelic.

> It's interesting how often m means me, and t or d means thou, across all kinds of European languages.

Most European languages are related, but it also applies to Finnish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_verb_conjugation , which is not Indoeuropean.

Also, the Etruscan (also non-Indoeuropean) first person pronoun is "mi": "mi spanti larices" = I am Larice's plate". The second person pronoun appears to be "un", though.

"Bende elma var" sounds a bit odd to say "I have an apple" in Turkish, Possibly more natural is "Bir elmam var". or "Benim bir elmam var"

That's correct but depends on the context and the point still stands luckily. Two types of possesives and my example is like dative in a way.

It's interesting you mention the relationship with Turkish. I had a colleague that would keep mentioning the similarities while I was learning it.

I feel like during Ottoman times Hungary got quite a lot of Turkish words. And also the Baths!

The Hungarian language had more contact with Turkic languages during the migratory period before settling in the current area of Hungary (so before the 9th century). Linguistic exchange was more limited during the Ottoman times.

>I'd say that something that helped a lot was that in early 2000s there wasn't that much people speaking English in Budapest. So, no cheating.

The situation has changed quite a lot since then. My former english teacher (monolingual english speaker). regularly complained about people being too quick to whip out their Hello Turist[0] sounding english instead of replying in Hungarian these days.

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tsznw_eXpEs

I went back in 2013, and is crazy how much everything is changed. So many startups and way more immigrants. Don't doubt it.

For what it’s worth we have 2 kids, I speak exclusively Hungarian with them and my wife speaks exclusively Ukrainian with them. They speak English in school. To my utter astonishment they speak Hungarian way better than Ukrainian - my conclusion on this sample of 2 is that Hungarian is easier to learn than Ukrainian or English when you don’t speak any other languages. Indeed I always suspected people find Hungarian so difficult simply because it is so different from any other language in the region.

For any native speaker of Indo-European languages it is much easier to learn another Indo-European language than to learn a language from a different family, mainly because the Indo-European languages share a lot of their vocabulary, even if that is not always apparent to less experienced speakers, because the pronunciation of the words can differ very much.

Learning unfamiliar words is a problem equally difficult for any language that belongs to another language family, so the difference in difficulties can appear mostly in grammar or phonetics.

The Indo-European languages are among the most difficult for speakers of other language families, because the so-called fusional inflection characteristic for the IE languages, which is very seldom encountered in other language families of the world, is an extremely irregular means of expressing the grammatical relationships between words.

So, except for a few secondarily simplified languages, like English, it is much more difficult to learn an IE language grammar than it is to learn a more regular grammar, such as that of languages like Hungarian or Turkish, or even that of Japanese.

In most non-IE languages that are considered difficult, the difficulties are not in grammar, but in phonetics, when those languages use sounds seldom encountered in other languages, e.g. tones, clicks, pharyngeals etc.

> In most non-IE languages that are considered difficult, the difficulties are not in grammar, but in phonetics, when those languages use sounds seldom encountered in other languages, e.g. tones, clicks, pharyngeals etc.

In Hungarian the verb conjugation can be quite complicated and there a lot of rules and exceptional cases. On the other hand, it doesn't have any sound that doesn't exist in German.

> On the other hand, it doesn't have any sound that doesn't exist in German.

Except for gy, ty, ny, dz, also the short a sound. Plus the standard German r differs from what Hungarian uses.

When I studied Hungarian, my impression was that it is more consistent relative to other languages - things like the noun cases and vowel harmony seem complex at first, but are really straightforward to use once you grok them. English, on the other hand, is more of an analytic language, so you have to rely more on chaining together phrasal patterns that "just sound right" and there are very few consistent rules. So I think a lot of the perceived difficulty of learning Hungarian is really the difficulty of unlearning the ambiguity and inconsistency you might be used to in English or a similar language.

I regularly visit Hungary on vacation and for work, and every time I try to get into a bit of the local language, I fail miserably. Its the sort of language I think you really, really have to prepare to learn - with books, media, movies, etc. - long before you try to speak it with others.

That said, it is indeed one of the most beautiful languages I've ever heard (and I've travelled around the planet 3 times so far) - I have to say that it is also very, very interesting to travel Hungary with zero understanding whatsoever of the road signs and other public information. Thank goodness a lot of Hungarians speak German ..

I learned (a local variant of) Hungarian naming convention (also apparently known as Hungarian notation) early on in software development. I'm still not sure it was a good idea, but it was certainly due to a Hungarian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simonyi

I've also been to Budapest, but despite the above the locals and I still could not communicate with one another except in english.

There's System Hungarian, which was apparently the result of a misunderstanding, and Apps Hungarian, which is actually useful: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...

I use Apps Hungarian in my own code.

Another well-known person of letters who started to learn Hungarian was Edmund Wilson (died 1972). I learned of the backstory to this in the late Frederick Exley’s memoir. He was obsessed with Wilson and interviewed his assistant, a Hungarian woman many years his junior who apparently made a huge impression on Wilson.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/08/missionary-2

I wouldn't consider 56 late in life to learn something new. I intend to keep learning until the day I die.

lol i thought you meant that bizzare c/c++ windows variable naming pattern.

lpwszSomeName

I remember the lpsz vars: long pointer to string zero terminated. What's the W for this? I'm guessing Simonyi's Hungarian Notation was for early C compilers that didn't have function prototype decls? Younger HNers may not remember early C compilers where function declarations just declared the return type, not the parameters.

I think it's a pointer to a wide string with 16-bit chars, but it's been a while since I last came across Hungarian notation. I have been intending to reread "Writing Solid Code" one of these days, though.

An inspiration that I just needed.

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