Three Weeks of Hungarian

This week I continued to progress in DuoLingo. My goal for this week was to learn definite conjugations of common verbs, but although I made some progress towards that end, I haven’t made as much progress as I had hoped. Instead I spent my past week drilling my understanding of the vocabulary I have learned so far, accusative and plural endings for nouns, and plural person indefinite verb conjugations (we see, you see, they see). I’ve gotten to a point where I think I need to practice what I know a little bit more before moving on to keep things from becoming too confusing.

I’m hoping that in the coming week I can get comfortable enough with my current knowledge to continue progressing. Outside of DuoLingo, I’ve started trying to translate some of the articles on the Hungarian National Geographic website using Glosbe as needed to look up the definition of words. It’s pretty difficult for me to read those still, but I’m hoping that the exposure to the language with pictures and context will be beneficial.

I’m still trying to find Hungarian children’s ebooks to read on my Kindle but I’m having trouble finding them. That might be because my Hungarian knowledge isn’t good enough yet to know how to search for them in Hungarian though. What I’d really like is to be able to find the Magic Treehouse series translated to Hungarian, or a similar book series. Something like the DK Eyewitness books would be good too.

Some Hungarian sentences

I figured as a little self exercise this week I’d post some pictures and try to write as much as I can about them with my current understanding of Hungarian. Native speakers who are reading this, please feel free to correct my sentences and translations below.

Ez egy piros autó. Azok ablakok az autó mögött vannak. Az autó Ford Mustang GT. Ez az autó egy Ford Mustang GT. Az autó kint áll. Az egy épület az autó mögött van. Az épület az autó mögött van. Az az autó szeretek Szeretem ezt az autót.

This is a red car. There are windows behind the car. The car is a Ford Mustang GT. The car stands (is parked) outside. There is a building behind the car. I like this car.

A férfi kint sétál. A férfi nem bent van. A fák között sétál. A férfi van egyedül. A férfi egyedül van. A férfi nem alacsony. Nem sétálok, hanem ülök. Te sétálsz vagy ülsz? Szeretsz sétálni?

The man walks outside. The man is not inside. He walks among/between the trees. The man is alone. The man is not short. I am not walking, but sitting. Do you walk or sit? Do you like to walk?

Resources

• Word order for adverbs of frequency - I was having trouble understanding where adverbs of frequency belong in a sentence and this blog post helped
• UPDATE: Just found this website, and I was able to read this article without much trouble! I’m excited that I’ve finally found something I can read that isn’t too difficult!

Corrections

Thanks to Teleonomix for the corrections to my Hungarian above.