Hungarian Survival Guide

  1. Uralic family, Finno-Ugric branch. Not related to Turkic languages. Related to Finnish and Estonian, but there’s no mutual intelligibility, they’re living apart for several millennia.
  2. The alphabet is 99% phonetic. Exceptions include: j–ly, consonant assimilation and mute final h in certain words.
  3. Special consonants are written with digraphs (and a trigraph), special vowels with accented letters.
  4. Is the only language on the world using the double acute accent or hungarumlaut as part of its everyday orthography: ő, ű.
  5. Double consonants and long vowels pronounced long.
  6. Word stress is always on the first syllable.
  7. No genders. A single pronoun for he, she and it.
  8. A suffix -né to create wives of men (family names and occupations), but it’s gradually becoming old-fashioned. Another one, -nő to call women by their own occupation. Királynő is a queen who is a queen, while királyné is the wife of a king.
  9. Two definite articles, a before consonants and az before vowels, but just one indefinite one, egy.
  10. Counted nouns like ten dogs are in singular because the number is enough to show it’s plural.
  11. No prepositions. Instead, there are suffixes and postpositions.
  12. Nouns may take suffixes for plural, accusative, possessive, qualificative and some 16-20 case suffixes.
  13. Plural, accusative and possessive can be combined, even several times, and they can be followed by a case suffix.
  14. Most suffixes obey vowel harmony.
  15. Some suffixes are connected with a linking vowel, to avoid consonant clusters. These linking vowels obey vowel harmony.
  16. An adjective can be the subject of a sentence; English adds one for such purposes, like the red one, the little one. Hungarian doesn’t.
  17. Adjectives can be declined as well as the nouns, but only in subjective role.
  18. The attribute is always in singular nominative, like in English (the brown dogs), no matter what number and/or case the noun is in.
  19. Verbs have two tenses: present and past in both indicative and conditional.
  20. Verbs have no future form, it’s created with an auxiliary verb.
  21. Double negation: I don’t see nobody means I can’t see anybody.
  22. Verbs don’t need personal pronouns, they have suffixes for six different persons. However, personal pronouns can be added before, this adds some emphasis.
  23. The hardest part of the grammar is probably the indefinite vs. definite conjugation of verbs, corresponding to English I see something and I see it.
  24. Personal pronouns have cases as well as nouns do.
  25. Paired and plural body parts are usually used in singular, however, it isn’t an error to use them in plural. Just it a bit childish. So, she has nice tooth doesn’t mean she’s having only one tooth that’s nice: she has nice teeth indeed.
  26. There’s a large and practically unlimited set of diminutives. In the colloquial, not only personal names may receive diminutives but many other nouns, too. For example, uborkasaláta → ubisali (cucumber salad).
  27. An archaic way of forming diminutives is turning the first consonant to a bilabial or adding an initial bilabial consonant: Anna → Panna, István → Pista, András → Bandi. They can be used also in paired forms, keeping both the original and the bilabilal one: Anna-Panna, Ista-Pista, cica → cicamica (kitten → kittymitty). Old forms created this way are still used, but new ones are rarely found.
  28. Uppercase in English but lowercase in Hungarian: names of months and days of the week; names of languages and nations (people in Russia are russians and speaking in russian); adjectives (including locative adjectives formed from geographic names by a suffix -i) like a london man, a french vine, a japanese holiday.
  29. A language spoken or being learned is generally not called in accusative but in essive-modal, signed by suffix -ul, -ül: magyarul beszélek literally means I speak Hungarianly, the Hungarian way, but this is an adverb, not a noun. So, the name of the language is not magyarul, it’s magyar.