32 Comments
Sofőr for driver, sounds exactly like the French (and English word) 'Chauffeur', which means driver. Nice.
Viennese has a lot of French words incorporated (due to the fact, that the court in Vienna spoke French and people tried to seem sophisticated by emulating them). Among those: Chauffeur or (more modern) Schofför. I'm curious if "Portemonnaie", "Trottoir" or "Pompesfunebre" also turn up in Hungarian. :)
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How about kanapé? :)
There aren't too many foreign words in Hungarian, mostly Serbo-Croatian and German loanwords. The Hungarians are rather proud of the purity of their language and I guess there are some that actively try to avoid using foregn words - saying vezető for "driver" or pamlag for "couch".
Well, I guess there are those weirdos in every language. Especially if - as right now in Hungary - nationalists movements are strong. And yes, Kanapé could be either a couch or an "open" sandwich.
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It's a couch in this case. The word for an open sandwich leans more towards the very German "buttered bread": vajaskenyér.
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Polish: szofer. It's kind of a fancy word tho. We'd rather say kierowca.
No, there isn't. Technically we only have three simple tenses. Past, present and future.
next time, when you hear (or think) that hungarian is one of the most difficult languages, just remember this, and try to imagine us as we fight with the countless verb tenses of other languages (when we learn a foreign language). that will be a funny and priceless moment. :D
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You know, I was thinking... as difficult as Hungarian is for us native English speakers, it must be just as difficult for Hungarian speakers to learn English. Although there are certainly many more resources available to help people learn English, than there are for Americans like me to learn Hungarian. Anyway, thanks to all the native Hungarian speakers for helping us learn this very interesting language. I look forward to unlocking more of its secrets.
you're absolutely right. that's why i don't like when people say, that hungarian is one of the most difficult languages, or spread the meme that shows hungarian is the godzilla of the languages. it's funny, but not true. yes, it's different from the other european languages, people find less similarities with their native language and yes, it needs a different way of thinking, a different logic, but it creates a vice versa situation: we have the same difficulties when we learn a foreign language. and we don't have a "relative" that would be easier to learn (like e.g. italian - spanish). so hungarian is not a strong godzilla, just a "lonely orphan". :)
Yeah I kept hearing that Hungarian was difficult, but it isn't too bad so far.
What is different is the vocabulary. In almost every other european language I can trace either German or Latin roots. Not here. There are a lot of words which are very hard to remember because they are so different. But maybe that's also a matter of age. My brain isn't as versatile as it used to be. :)
I believe only past and present remained, the conjugation of verbs for future (én elmenendek, te elmenendsz, ő elmenend, etc) has died out. We are forming the future tense now like, e.g. in French or in Italian, etc
Elmenend? Olyan jó néha olvasni, hogy vannak még emberek, akik tudják mit jelent egy-egy ilyen régies formában ragozott szó. Évtizedek óta nem találkoztam ilyen ragozással a magyar nyelvben "élő beszédben", még példaként felhozva sem. Utoljára a gimnáziumban fordítottunk így, magyar-latin faktos diákként. Köszönöm, tényleg jó volt olvasni! :)
Ó, ez nálunk megy a családban, amikor valaki vicces kedvében van, és szórakoztatni akarja a többieket :-D
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Let's see... Present and Past are simple, Future is a compound tense (fog + inf.). Passive tenses are obsolete (now built with 'they [do this]' instead). Present Conditional is simple, Past Conditional is compound, Imperative is simple. So, four true tenses for which you have to learn conjugations. (And those are very similar to one another, so no fear.)
Intransitive verbs have one way of conjugation (except in special cases), with six persons; transitive verbs have two ways with six persons each, plus one special (the 'I -> you' form, such as szeretlek = I love you). And up to four participles per verb.
Summed up, up to 56 forms for each verb. English has 6. Oh well. xD
Shoutout to all o' y'all who saw that "sofőr" is the Hungarian form of "chauffeur."
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Meanwhile the word for "driver" in Indonesian is "supir" or "sopir". Could it be a loanword? Hmmm
The slow version of the phrase didn't work for me, did it work for anyone else?
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There are no slow voice versions in this course. All the sentences have been recorded with a native Hungarian speaker; they can't be slowed down.
It's good that the recordings have been made by a native speaker! Perhaps later the slow recordings can be added, or maybe a version with a pause between words. That would be helpful!... On the other hand, of course we need to train our ears to normal speech! :-)
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She speaks the sentences pretty clearly, at least. :)
I don't think there will be any slow voices added in the near future. That would mean either recording or manually cutting up the ~2000 sentences again, and that wouldn't be fun for anyone.
Hungarian is a language with very clear pronounciation and simple rules for it, so I'm sure you'll be able to manage. :)
