"A gazdag amerikai férfi a dolgozószobában van."

Translation: The rich American man is in the study.

[BetsyLowe]

In English, we don't have the words "study room" or "office room." I promise, we really do have rooms called a "study."

[MaerskBuddhapest]

Thank you :)

[FerEtayoRguez]

I just can't stop listening to this... adolgozószobábanvan

[KatjaJuliannova]

Could this word also apply to a workroom for manufacturing?

[RyagonIV]

I think that would be more adequately translated with műhely ("work-place").

[chirelchirel]

So it's dolgozó/szobá/ban? Worker-room-in?

[RyagonIV]

I'd translate dolgozó rather as "working", but yes, your analysis is right. :)
(-ó/-ő forms the present participle of a verb: nevet - to laugh, a nevető gyerek - the laughing child)

[chirelchirel]

Thanks. I'll blame it on my online dictionary :D

[RyagonIV]

Just to clarify: your dictionary is not wrong. Dolgozó means both "working" and "working person = worker". Hungarian makes little difference between adjectives (and participles) and the respective nouns. So you have magas meaning tall, and "egy magas" can refer to a tall person (or object), where you would say in English "a tall one". Likewise, "a nevető" can simply mean "the laughing person".

[chirelchirel]

It is similar in Finnish, but based on your explanation I have a feeling it happens less than in Hungarian. Just a hunch, maybe I'll remember to come back here one day to comment when I know more.

[chirelchirel]

Also it seems like most rooms have the same suffix, I suppose this is not a coincidence? So are they something like sleeping room, washing room etc.? (I have no idea what the first parts of the words mean, so these are just guesses).

[RyagonIV]

Szoba is not a suffix, it's an own noun, simply meaning "room". Words like dolgozószoba are compound nouns. Just two nouns smooshed together, like the English "teacup" (teáscsésze, by the way. Bit of a tonguetwister. Which is also a compound noun.) So you can translate dolgozószoba as "working room", neat and simple.

Dolgozó means "working", as we already found out. Then you have fürdőszoba - bathroom. Fürdő simply means "bathing", from the verb fürdik - to bathe. Hálószoba - bedroom is a bit of a special case. The translations you can find for háló tell you it's "net" or "web", but it is also a (more archaic) word for "sleeping".
I think these three are the only ones discussed in this course that have szoba in their name. You can also have things like gyerekszoba - children's room, or várószoba - waiting room.

The living room - nappali, is also sometimes just referred to as szoba. "Gyerünk a szobába." - "Let's go to the (living) room."

[chirelchirel]

I didn't mean szoba, but the -ó/-ő suffix before it. But you did answer my question with your examples, so thanks again :)

[Arpad737071]

Thank you for this nice explanation, which I would like to expand a bit. Most important, "nappali" is not synonymous to "szoba". In fact, children's room or bedroom can be also referred to as "szoba". "Dolgozószoba" is not a compound of two nouns, but of a present participle (called "folyamatos melléknévi igenév" in Hungarian) and of a noun. "Hálószoba" has nothing to do with "háló" as "net" or "web". Its "háló" part is also a present participle, derived from the verb "hál", which means (if used with locative) "to sleep somewhere overnight" or (if used together with a nominal that has the suffix -val/-vel) "to have sex (with somebody)".

[JanTatouse]

Shouldn't 'study room' also be accepted here?

[MaerskBuddhapest]

Or yet another suggestion: "office room". I first hear of a room called just "study" :)

[ataltane]

"study" and "office" are correct in English. No one says "study room" or "office room.

[Ksenia139960]

I understand it means work room, but could they really not think of a shorter, more efficient word?

[RyagonIV]

Ksenia, in German there's "Arbeitszimmer" for that. :)

Hungarian's efficiency lies elsewhere. It's an agglutinative language, and it's typical for those languages to have a rather small number of morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful word units, like "small", "-est", "mean", "-ing", "-ful", "word", "unit" and "-s". Rather than creating, choosing or adopting new morphemes, agglutinative languages rather use the morphemes they have to build up the desired meaning:

• compute + -er = szám + -ít + -ó + gép ("number" + "-ate" + "-ing" + "machine")
• police = rend + őr + -ség ("order" + "keeper" + "-ship")
• dent- + -ist = fog + orvos ("tooth" + "doctor")
• watch = kar + óra ("arm" + "clock")

So while English juggles with morphemes like "work", "job", "study", "employ" and similar, Hungarian is good with just using "dolgoz-" and modifying it into the desired direction. You want to talk about a room that you use for working? Why not call it "work-ing room", "dolgoz-ó-szoba"?

In more technical terms, English is memory-heavy, because you have to learn a lot of words that look different even if they have a related meaning, like "tooth", "dental", "fang" or "molar". Hungarian is computation-heavy, since you have fewer different morphemes to learn (all the toothy things can be expressed with combinations of fog), but you have to remember to combine them in the right way to get the correct meaning across.