Hunglish.orgHungarian is a wonderful, crazy, flexible, bewildering, interesting, incomprehensible and perfectly learnable ... if you've got a few centuries.
Written by Scott Savoie
One of the difficult things about living in Hungary is the language. What I have discovered is that often times the Hungarians don’t understand it, either.
The lack of a logical, structured means of communication is what drives many Hungarians to foreign-langauage courses.
My guess is that Yoda’s mother tongue was a bit like Magyarül because that’s how I speak it: „Mmmm, backwards I talk.”
The thing is Yoda is, like, 900 years old, a jedi master and schoolteacher, and yet he still can’t conjugate the verb „to be” in the simple present.
As much as I hate drawing inspiration from sci-fi, Yoda is my role model. In another few hundred years, I may learn Hungarian.
The problem is the bewildering use of the prefixes such as „meg” and „fel” and „be” and „ki.”
Sometimes these prefixes utterly change the meaning of words. Other times they’re just decorative.
Words that contain this letter combination number in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Nobody knows for sure.
You look words up in the dictionary and they don’t seem to exist.
This is because in Hungarian grammar, words may be created and changed by the user at will.
In addition, just to complicate things, Hungarians like to use diminutives, slang, and contractions, thus arbitrarily inventing, lengthening and shortening words.
Hungarian is learnable, however. Millions of children all over Hungary have done it, so I suppose I can, too.
The scary thing is they say Chinese is harder.