How to learn Hungarian by reading

Hungarian is unlike its neighbors. It’s a Uralic language, distantly related to Finnish and Estonian, and not to the Germanic, Slavic and Romance languages around it. Its words are built from a root and a chain of suffixes: ház is “house,” házam “my house,” házamban “in my house,” házaimban “in my houses.”

That sounds daunting, and there’s a lot to learn. But Hungarian is also regular. Spelling follows sound, stress always falls on the first syllable, and there’s no grammatical gender: ő means both “he” and “she.” Its literature, from Sándor Petőfi’s poems and Mór Jókai’s adventure novels to Dezső Kosztolányi, Sándor Márai, the Nobel laureates Imre Kertész and László Krasznahorkai, rewards the effort.

What makes Hungarian hard to read

• Letters and letter groups. Long vowels are marked: á, é, í, ó, ő, ú, ű. Letter pairs stand for single sounds: cs (“ch”), gy, ly, ny, sz (“s”), ty, zs (“s” in “pleasure”). And plain s is “sh,” so Budapest ends in “pesht.”
• Suffixes for everything. Possession, plural and case all attach to the word in order, so one word can carry what English says in a phrase: házaimban, “in my houses.”
• Cases of place and direction. Hungarian has around eighteen cases, most of them for where things are and where they go. There’s a neat grid: -ban (in), -ba (into), -ból (out of); -on (on), -ra (onto), -ról (off, about); -nál (at), -hoz (to), -tól (from).
• Vowel harmony. Suffixes change their vowels to match the word: a házban, “in the house,” but a kertben, “in the garden.”
• Two conjugations. Verbs take different endings depending on whether their object is definite: látok egy házat, “I see a house,” but látom a házat, “I see the house.”
• Prefixes that move. Verbal prefixes like meg-, el-, ki- and le- can leave the verb: megírtam a levelet, “I wrote the letter,” but nem írtam meg a levelet, “I didn’t write the letter.”
• Word order by emphasis. Whatever comes right before the verb is in focus: Tom festette le a kerítést means “it was Tom who painted the fence.”
• No verb “to have.” Hungarian says “there is a book of mine”: van egy könyvem, “I have a book.”
• Names back to front. Hungarian puts the family name first: Petőfi Sándor is the poet English calls Sándor Petőfi.

Hungarian reading at each level

Level by level, this is what Hungarian text looks like on the CEFR scale:

• A2, elementary. Short sentences in the present and past, the most common place suffixes, possessive endings, both conjugations in their simplest uses, simple commands, and short clauses with hogy and mert.
• B1, intermediate. The full set of place and direction cases, verbal prefixes that separate, the conditional (lenne, “would be”), and subordinate clauses with hogy, mert and amikor.
• B2, upper intermediate. The subjunctive in purpose clauses, participles, the potential suffix -hat/-het (“can, may”), and long sentences where emphasis drives word order.
• C1, advanced. Lightly condensed, and otherwise close to the original. C2 is the complete novel.

The scale itself is explained in CEFR levels explained.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at A2 and at B2

The famous fence, written for this page at two levels:

A2

Tom Sawyer nem szeret dolgozni. Egy szombaton Polly néni azt mondja neki, hogy fesse le a kerítést. Tom nagyon szomorú, mert a barátai játszanak.

Tom Sawyer doesn’t like work. One Saturday, Aunt Polly tells him to paint the fence. Tom is very sad, because his friends are playing.

B2

Tom úgy tett, mintha a meszelés lenne a világ legjobb szórakozása, és ez olyan jól sikerült neki, hogy a barátai végül még a kincseiket is odaadták, csak hogy helyette meszelhessenek.

Tom acted as if whitewashing were the best fun in the world, and he pulled it off so well that his friends ended up handing over even their treasures, just so they could whitewash in his place.

The A2 text shows néni, “aunt,” after the name, and azt mondja… hogy, where Hungarian points ahead to the clause with azt, “that.” In fesse le, a command, the prefix le follows the verb. The B2 sentence adds mintha… lenne, “as if… were,” the superlative legjobb, “best,” and two words built from many parts: kincseiket is kincs (treasure) + ei (plural, possessed) + k (their) + et (object), and meszelhessenek is meszel (whitewash) + hess (may, can: -het fused with the subjunctive -j-) + enek (they).

How to practice reading Hungarian every day

1. Read along with the narration. Start a section and follow the highlighted words as they’re spoken. Long vowels and first-syllable stress are easy to hear, and the audio helps long words fall into their parts.
2. Peel words from the end. When a long word stops you, find the root at the front and work through the suffixes. After a few weeks you’ll do it at reading speed.
3. Tap for the base form. If the root is new, tap it. If you know the root, try the suffixes yourself first.
4. Reread. Hungarian rewards second readings: the same suffixes come back on every page, and familiar text lets you notice them.

Why start with adapted books? By Paul Nation’s estimate (2006, “How large a vocabulary is needed for reading and listening?”), unsimplified novels in English take a vocabulary of around 8,000 to 9,000 word families. Nation’s figures are for English, and in Hungarian each of those words also appears in dozens of suffixed forms, so the case for graded reading is, if anything, stronger. Read more in how many words you need to read a novel, extensive reading and reading while listening.

Classics to start with

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is episodic, funny and full of everyday life, a good read at A2 or B1.
• Dracula has a Hungarian thread: Jonathan Harker travels east through Budapest, and the Transylvania he reaches was then part of the Kingdom of Hungary. A gripping read at B1 or B2.
• Treasure Island is a page-turner with plenty of dialogue, ideal for a first novel.
• The Count of Monte Cristo is a long, satisfying revenge story for B2.
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is short and playful, good at A2 or B1.

Reading Hungarian in Lexo

Hungarian words carry so many suffixes that the base form is often the hardest thing to see, and it’s the first thing Lexo’s word card gives you. Tap a word and you get its meaning in that sentence, its base form and its part of speech, which takes you straight from házaimban to ház or from kincseiket to kincs. When a word belongs to a phrase, such as a verb whose prefix has moved away, the card explains the phrase too, and the whole sentence is translated into English. Words you want to keep go into your Words list.

Every word can be played on its own, and the whole book is narrated, with different voices for different characters and the text highlighted word by word as it’s read. Sentence-by-sentence mode is there for hard passages: one sentence, its audio, its translation.

Pick the level per book, from A2 to C2. Editions that don’t exist yet are written on request, starting with chapter 1, which takes a few minutes, and the first reader keeps a dated “First edition” mark. Books download for offline reading, and purchases restore through your Apple ID on a new device, so there’s no separate account.

Hungarian’s distant relative on this site is Finnish. Turkish builds words in a similar way, though the two aren’t related, and Romanian and Ukrainian are spoken just across its borders.

Lexo is coming soon to the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Get notified at launch.