Chilling in Budapest...

Sign protesting the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956

It's been about 2 months since I moved to Budapest and I'm finding this city to be a very lively and inexpensive place to live. The people are nice and I'm finally making some headway on the Hungarian language! Last week I was reading a flyer and actually understood my first written sentence in Hungarian! Some of you may laugh, but Hungarian is a frighteningly difficult language, at least at first glance. Fortunately I hired a little old Hungarian lady to give me some basic language lessons for about $5/hour. I can barely say a few sentences but what I can boast is that I finally know how to PRONOUNCE words in Hungarian. This is no small feat mind you. I mean, how would you pronounce "Hogy vagy"? - which means "how's it going?". Or "gyógyfürdő" which means "thermal bath?" I'm the kind of person who would rather keep his mouth shut than make mincemeat out of words like that, as most foreigners do... So concentrating first on learning pronunciation, at a bare minimum, has been an important strategy as I've travelled through Europe and been bombarded by countless new languages. I'd have to say that Hungarian ranks right up there with Finnish and Estonian as being the most difficult. Linguists believe that the Hungarian language originated somewhere in western Siberia over a thousand years ago. Being non-Indo-European, it bears ZERO resemblance to any other language spoken in Europe. You'll hear people say that it's like Finnish, but trust me, it's nothing like Finnish even though they are part of the same language family and have about 6 words in common. English and Hindi are also related but they are about as alike as Hungarian and Finnish.

Anyway, one great thing about Hungarian, or "Magyarul" (Hungarian) as they say in Magyarország (Hungary), is that pronunciation is quite easy once you understand a few basic rules. Unlike English, there are no exceptions to the pronunciation rules, so once you learn them, you can pronounce anything in Hungarian just by looking at the way it's spelled. So far my favorite word to say is "Szénsavmentes Ásványvíz" - it just sounds so cool! Actually it's several words and means "non-carbonated mineral water", as opposed to "Szénsavas Ásványvíz" which means "carbonated mineral water" - something I frequently order in restaurants. It's a lot harder to say though than "sör", which is the word for beer, but least it sounds better than the word for cheese, which is "sajt" - pronounced "shite".

Even though I can't speak or understand Hungarian being able to order beer, water and just about anything on the menu feels like a great accomplishment to me. I'm still struggling with "Fütyülős Barack" though, which is a well know Hungarian peach schnapps that I've fallen in love with, but I'm working on it.

Technorati Tags: Budapest, Hungarian, Hungary