quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Fixed (I reckon you can say "Romantic languages", but this term isn't really used in order to avoid confusion with the Romantic movement, probably).
You see, English is a Germanic language with loads of words borrowed from Latin/French, so both families sound quite - for the lack of a better word - "familiar" to English speakers. Hungarian, however, unlike Russian or Hindi which are distant cousins of English, doesn't even belong to the Indo-European languages. Along with Finnish, Estonian and Basque, Hungarian is a language that shares no common ancestor with the other European languages as far as we know.
On the one hand, Hungarian is probably a tricky language for us because we need to learn everything from scratch: most words won't sound like anything we know, it's got nearly 20 cases and more vowels than you probably imagine. However, it's not as hard as most people take it to be: the cases (and pretty much all prefixes and suffixes in the language) are quite regular, there's a "vowel harmony" so it's easy to get a hang of how the vowels work after a while... and, if 13 million people can speak it, so can you
(I wonder if that's really worth the trouble, however) |
Believe it or not, I actually knew all that. Finno Ugric and all that.
<--- Twice in one day. Yeah, I just went there.
I think I may have learnt it from you a couple of years ago though. Hungarians have very strange accents, they sound like Asians crossed with... something else.
Last edited by Domesticated on Feb-26-2011 at 06:35
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