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I learned Hungarian late in life (2011)

by cribbles on 5/9/22, 10:18 AM with 34 comments

• by diegoeche on 5/12/22, 12:24 PM

  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.

• by e-master on 5/12/22, 12:57 PM

  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.

• by aa-jv on 5/12/22, 1:22 PM

  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 ..

• by partomniscient on 5/12/22, 1:11 PM

  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.

• by ilamont on 5/12/22, 1:08 PM

  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

• by james-bcn on 5/12/22, 1:25 PM

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

• by carl_sandland on 5/12/22, 1:08 PM

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

  lpwszSomeName

• by rikelmens on 5/12/22, 1:40 PM

  An inspiration that I just needed.