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For what it’s worth we have 2 kids, I speak exclusively Hungarian with them and my wife speaks exclusively Ukrainian with them. They speak English in school. To

For what it’s worth we have 2 kids, I speak exclusively Hungarian with them and my wife speaks exclusively Ukrainian with them. They speak English in school. To my utter astonishment they speak Hungarian way better than Ukrainian - my conclusion on this sample of 2 is that Hungarian is easier to learn than Ukrainian or English when you don’t speak any other languages. Indeed I always suspected people find Hungarian so difficult simply because it is so different from any other language in the region.

adrian_b 4y ago
For any native speaker of Indo-European languages it is much easier to learn another Indo-European language than to learn a language from a different family, mainly because the Indo-European languages share a lot of their vocabulary, even if that is not always apparent to less experienced speakers, because the pronunciation of the words can differ very much. Learning unfamiliar words is a problem equally difficult for any language that belongs to another language family, so the difference in difficulties can appear mostly in grammar or phonetics. The Indo-European languages are among the most difficult for speakers of other language families, because the so-called fusional inflection characteristic for the IE languages, which is very seldom encountered in other language families of the world, is an extremely irregular means of expressing the grammatical relationships between words. So, except for a few secondarily simplified languages, like English, it is much more difficult to learn an IE language grammar than it is to learn a more regular grammar, such as that of languages like Hungarian or Turkish, or even that of Japanese. In most non-IE languages that are considered difficult, the difficulties are not in grammar, but in phonetics, when those languages use sounds seldom encountered in other languages, e.g. tones, clicks, pharyngeals etc.
- oldsecondhand 4y ago
  > In most non-IE languages that are considered difficult, the difficulties are not in grammar, but in phonetics, when those languages use sounds seldom encountered in other languages, e.g. tones, clicks, pharyngeals etc. In Hungarian the verb conjugation can be quite complicated and there a lot of rules and exceptional cases. On the other hand, it doesn't have any sound that doesn't exist in German.
  - shiomiru 4y ago
    > On the other hand, it doesn't have any sound that doesn't exist in German. Except for gy, ty, ny, dz, also the short a sound. Plus the standard German r differs from what Hungarian uses.
wintersky 4y ago
When I studied Hungarian, my impression was that it is more consistent relative to other languages - things like the noun cases and vowel harmony seem complex at first, but are really straightforward to use once you grok them. English, on the other hand, is more of an analytic language, so you have to rely more on chaining together phrasal patterns that "just sound right" and there are very few consistent rules. So I think a lot of the perceived difficulty of learning Hungarian is really the difficulty of unlearning the ambiguity and inconsistency you might be used to in English or a similar language.

adrian_b 4y ago

For any native speaker of Indo-European languages it is much easier to learn another Indo-European language than to learn a language from a different family, mainly because the Indo-European languages share a lot of their vocabulary, even if that is not always apparent to less experienced speakers, because the pronunciation of the words can differ very much. Learning unfamiliar words is a problem equally difficult for any language that belongs to another language family, so the difference in difficulties can appear mostly in grammar or phonetics. The Indo-European languages are among the most difficult for speakers of other language families, because the so-called fusional inflection characteristic for the IE languages, which is very seldom encountered in other language families of the world, is an extremely irregular means of expressing the grammatical relationships between words. So, except for a few secondarily simplified languages, like English, it is much more difficult to learn an IE language grammar than it is to learn a more regular grammar, such as that of languages like Hungarian or Turkish, or even that of Japanese. In most non-IE languages that are considered difficult, the difficulties are not in grammar, but in phonetics, when those languages use sounds seldom encountered in other languages, e.g. tones, clicks, pharyngeals etc.

oldsecondhand 4y ago
> In most non-IE languages that are considered difficult, the difficulties are not in grammar, but in phonetics, when those languages use sounds seldom encountered in other languages, e.g. tones, clicks, pharyngeals etc. In Hungarian the verb conjugation can be quite complicated and there a lot of rules and exceptional cases. On the other hand, it doesn't have any sound that doesn't exist in German.
- shiomiru 4y ago
  > On the other hand, it doesn't have any sound that doesn't exist in German. Except for gy, ty, ny, dz, also the short a sound. Plus the standard German r differs from what Hungarian uses.

wintersky 4y ago

When I studied Hungarian, my impression was that it is more consistent relative to other languages - things like the noun cases and vowel harmony seem complex at first, but are really straightforward to use once you grok them. English, on the other hand, is more of an analytic language, so you have to rely more on chaining together phrasal patterns that "just sound right" and there are very few consistent rules. So I think a lot of the perceived difficulty of learning Hungarian is really the difficulty of unlearning the ambiguity and inconsistency you might be used to in English or a similar language.