Easy Hungarian Vocabulary Builder

By Hugh Morrison

This book is aimed at fluent English speakers who want to quickly and easily build their Hungarian vocabulary. It sets out three types of words that will help achieve this goal:
Familiar words: these are words which closely resemble their English counterparts. There are many Hungarian words you already know – without even being aware of it!

Key words: these are the words which, once learnt, will open up a wide range of related words,

Memory aid words: words that can be learnt using a variety of memory 'tricks'.

Written by a native English speaker who understands many of the problems that students face in learning Hungarian, and edited by a Hungarian academic from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, this book is a must for all upper beginner/intermediate level students of Hungarian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hugh Morrison
• Release date: Feb 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301227709

Book preview

Who this book is aimed at

How to use this book

Key to abbreviations

A

B

C/Cs

D/Dzs

E

F

G

H

I, Í

J

K

L

M

N/Ny

O/Ó/Ö/Ő

P

R

S/Sz

T/Ty

U/Ú/Ü/Ű

V

W/X/Y/Z/Zs

Introduction

If you are learning Hungarian and have reached intermediate level – congratulations! A recent poll (Lexiophiles.com) showed Hungarian to be one of the hardest languages in the world to learn, with Mandarin as the hardest. So if you can learn Hungarian, you can pretty much learn anything! (Except perhaps Mandarin...). I have been studying Hungarian for over two years now and the good news is – it gets easier! Along the way I have noticed a few things that helped me learn, and I wrote this book to share that knowledge with you.

One of the reasons, we are often told, that Hungarian is so difficult to learn is that the language bears no relation to any other, (except perhaps Finnish, and even that is disputed). Remember when you learnt French or German at school? It was so much easier to learn words as there are so many connections with English and the words of Latin and Greek origin that form such a large part of many European languages.

Hungarian does have far fewer words connected to English, Latin or Greek, or in fact any other language. However, after studying the language for a while I began to notice that words of Latin and Greek origin, or those which bear close resemblance to English words, are actually used more than you might think. So the good news is – you already know several hundred words in Hungarian – without even realising it! This book lists most of those words, so that you can quickly build your vocabulary by learning which words in Hungarian are the same as, or very similar to, their English equivalents. It may not always be exactly the ‘right’ word to use, but it will get your meaning across.

The second thing I noticed is that Hungarian is an agglutinative language. That is, it is made up of words ‘glued’ together to form other words. So for example, the word for bicycle in Hungarian is kerékpár, which is formed from two words, kerék (wheel) and pár (pair), making ‘wheelpair’. This means

Reviews for Easy Hungarian Vocabulary Builder

[Dunne · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Terrible attempt at a language book. Author barely touched on his subject. No language knowledge needed to read or to write this book. Waste of time for a student.