Welcome! This course takes you from your very first Hungarian word all the way to C2, the level where you can read a newspaper column, follow a radio debate and write a formal letter without thinking twice. You don't need to know any other language first. You just need a little time each day.
Is Hungarian hard?
Hungarian has a reputation as one of the hardest languages in Europe. It is not related to English, German or the Slavic languages, so you can't guess many words. But don't let that put you off. Some parts of Hungarian are much easier than English:
- You read it the way it is written. Each letter, or pair of letters, makes one sound, every time. Once you know the alphabet (Lesson 1), you can read any word out loud.
- The stress is always on the first syllable. No exceptions, not even in borrowed words. You will never have to guess where the stress goes.
- There is no "he" or "she". One word, Å‘, means both. Nouns have no gender either, so there is nothing to memorise.
- The endings are very regular. Hungarian has a lot of cases (endings that do the job of English words like "in", "on" and "from"), but they behave in a very predictable way. Once you learn an ending, it works on almost every word.
- There are only two real tenses. Present and past. The future is made with a helper verb, much like English "will".
Now for the harder parts. It is better to know about them from the start:
- Words are built by adding endings. Where English uses several separate words, Hungarian sticks endings onto one word. For example, házaimban means "in my houses": ház (house) + plural + "my" + "in". This is called agglutination. It looks frightening at first, but you learn the endings one at a time, and each piece always means the same thing.
- Vowel harmony. Most endings come in two or three versions, and you choose the one whose vowels "match" the word. "In the house" is a házban, but "in the garden" is a kertben. Lesson 6 explains how this works, and it soon becomes automatic.
- Two sets of verb endings. Hungarian verbs change depending on whether you talk about a particular thing ("I read the book") or not ("I read a book"). This is called the definite conjugation, and you will meet it in Lesson 10.
None of these are as hard as they sound. We will take them slowly, and you will use each new idea in real sentences before you meet the next one.
How the lessons work
Every lesson is split into short parts. Use the tabs at the top of each lesson to move between them:
- Main Lesson – the explanation, with lots of examples.
- Vocabulary or Table – the new words or forms, on one page you can print.
- Exercises – type your answers into the boxes and press Enter to check them. If you get stuck, press Show answers.
Do the lessons in order. Each one uses the words from the lessons before it. Lessons 1 to 12 take you to around A2. Lessons 13 to 18 get you to B1. From Lesson 19 onward the course covers the grammar you need for B2, C1 and C2.
To type the Hungarian letters, see the Typing á é ő ű page. If you can't type an accent, the exercises will still tell you where you went wrong, but try to get used to the accents early: in Hungarian they change the meaning of words.
How to read the pronunciation guides
Next to most new words you will see a pronunciation guide written with English spelling. The syllable in CAPITALS is the one you stress. Since Hungarian always stresses the first syllable, the capitals will always be at the start:
szia (hi) – pronounced “SI-yaw”
köszönöm (thank you) – pronounced “KÖ-sö-nöm”
Magyarország (Hungary) – pronounced “MAW-dyawr-or-saag”
A double letter in the pronunciation guide means "hold this sound longer". Length matters a lot in Hungarian, and Lesson 1 explains why. You will also see that the Hungarian letter a is shown as "aw" and the letter s as "sh". Lesson 1 explains these too.
Listening
Every Hungarian word and sentence in this course has a small play button in front of it. Click it to hear the word. Listen often, and say each word out loud after you hear it. Try to listen to real Hungarian as early as you can too: Hungarian public radio and television put many of their programmes online for free.
The CEFR levels
The course is organised by the six levels of the Common European Framework. Here is roughly what each one means for Hungarian:
| Level | You can… | Lessons |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | greet people, count, order coffee, say who you are and talk about simple things in the present. | 1–6 |
| A2 | say what you like, talk about your family and where you are going, and find your way around a town. | 7–12 |
| B1 | talk about the past and the future, use verbal prefixes, say what you must and can do, and handle most everyday situations. | 13–18 |
| B2 | use all the cases and possessive forms with confidence, and say what you would do. | 19–21 |
| C1 | control word order and focus, use participles, and write clearly in a formal style. | 22–24 |
| C2 | shift between registers at will, understand idioms and slang, and read real texts in the original. | 25–26 |
Ready? Let's start with the alphabet. You may be surprised how quickly you can read Hungarian.
Kezdjük! (Let's begin!) – pronounced “KEZ-dyük”