December 2024.
Note: This site is under construction. Material gets added as I feel the urge.
The goal of this site is to make the Hungarian language accessible to anyone who wants to learn it. Seriously, I can't understand why anyone would NOT want to learn it. To me, Hungarian is the only language worth learning.
My problems are multiplied in Hungarian. Man do I feel like I am annoying when I try to talk. Boy do I feel sorry for people who have to endure me, whose time I waste by just opening my mouth. I wish they could know how much I enjoy their language, how good it feels to dig out just one small sentence, polish it until it shines and use it.
Hungarian language instruction, like the majority of language instruction, sucks. No matter how wise the material is or how fun the teachers are, after six years studying every day, I can barely converse on the level of a two-year old. I can't keep studying at this pace - I keep hitting walls.
So my challenge to myself is to study Hungarian and re-organize it for myself, in a way that makes sense to me. While I doubt that my notes will help others (I mostly just fumble around like an idiot as I try to make sense of things), my intent is to inspire other people to do the same - collect materials and re-organize them in a way that makes sense for you. Your way of organizing will be different than mine. Your taste in materials most certainly will be different than mine. I have very strange tastes!
We are not children here. We are not being spoonfed anymore. It is up to us to create our own assignments and our own program. As adults, we are already set in our ways. We have at our fingertips infinite books, videos, audio, and we have to self-learn. If we are lucky, we will be given a minimal number of commands by a text book or teacher, such as "underline this" and "write that" - but all on the written page or an impersonal video - not the sort of commands that we can eat or play in the snow with.
Let's jump aside for a moment and take up this idea of "commands". A child learns commands straight off the bat. Commands have power. A child can yell one out, or even whisper it, and watch the world change in front of their eyes. The day the baby is born, it receives commands. "Come, come. Drink some milk. Don't fuss. Go to sleep."
Commands, oddly enough, are one of the friendliest things you can say to a person. When you command someone, you are participating with them, you are including them in your world. Not only that, but a command is the easiest thing to undertand. Even a dog understands a command. Because a command defines itself. "I gotta go" is defined by you walking out the door. "Go!" is defined with a push from behind. "Let's go!" is defined with a yank on the arm.
My first course in Hungarian did not introduce commands until more than 2/3 of the way into the course. This was the FSI course (free! part of the public domain - and a really awesome course) designed to teach American diplomats Hungarian. If I had been studying full time eight hours a day (and I wasn't. I have a more than full-time job as a CPA) to get through the 24 units in the 1,100 hours estimated time for the course, I estimate commands would be introduced at the beginning of the fifth month of the six month course.
And the FSI course is my favorite course of them all. It is very well structured. Comparatively. But come on! There's got to be a better way.
As another example of the most aggravatingly organized instructional text, let's take a look at the organzation of my favorite grammar book, A Practical Hungarian Grammar, which explains grammar with the most creative and thought-provoking exercises. It is organized using a typical grammar book mindset, with each part of speech explained fully, in order of importance (verbs, then nouns, then adjectives, then participles, pronouns, finally sentence structure and word order). But this means that the first 100 plus pages of explanations and exercises is all about verbs. The explanation of articles is not until page 116, in the noun section. Yet understanding verbs depends on first understanding articles. How can anyone get through the verb exercises without first also understanding the related concepts?
Even babies are introduced to all the basics within their first few days of life. They are given short words and short sentences, but the whole range of the language is given to them from the start, so they can see how it fits together as a whole. You wouldn't spend the first few years waiting for a baby to perfectly recite his present tense conjugation table before introducing him to past tense, waiting for him to master each tense before introducing him to the next: present, then past, then future tense, and then finally after the baby (child or adolescent by now) is finished mastering all those, teach how to form commands. I mean you couldn't command him to do anything if you wanted to wait til the end to teach commands.
Even if we are lucky enugh to find someone who can teach us in the way we were taught as a child, we are up against problems that a child does not have.
We have ten times the amount of work to do of a child. First we have to un-learn all the grammar rules we got graded on for over a decade in our own language, unlearn the pronunciation that we so painstakingly copied when we were babies, unlearn our systems of manners, kill our expectations about how language should work.
Then we have to build up all those things we tore down. And without a parent handing us each object, without us really feeling its shape in our mouth as we hear its name.
Why do we have to make our own program? Until someone else makes one that makes sense, we have no other choice.
So this is my attempt to make a text, that I myself wouldn't mind following. I will try to do it in the same style I would like a teacher to use:
Anyways, thank you for visiting. Hopefully it helps :)