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1. Select the phrases that you want to learn from the list on the right. These cover a wide variety of Hungarian topics, including the numbers in Hungarian, Hungarian days, Hungarian greetings and the months in Hungarian. All the phrases have audio recorded by a native speaker.

2. Listen to and copy the native speech on the review page.

3. Learn the phrases using the learning methods which include flashcards and multiple choice to practice learning, speaking and recall.

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Hungarian

Hungarian is one of the Uralic (superfamily of languages consisting of the Finno-Ugric family and Samoyed) languages believed to have emerged many thousands of years ago from the northern Urals in Russia. It is part of the Finno-Ugric branch (of the Uralic languages) which include around fifteen languages scattered across Eurasia. In the fifth century AD it was spoken by the Onogouroi who spread through the Russian steppe in a sequence of migrations before finally populating modern day Hungary. The Hungarian name for themselves is Magyars, and their country Magyarország.

Hungarian grammar

Hungarian is an agglutinative language - words are build up from components (or morphemes which are speech elements which have a specific meaning or function and can not be split further).

Articles

Hungarian has both definite and indefinite articles which do not change in the plural. The word for 'the' is a so 'the flat' is a lakás.

The indefinite article is egy so 'a table' is egy asztal.

Nouns

Hungarian nouns have no gender but are inflected and so have different endings dependent on their case. The modification is made by adding layer(s) of suffixes to the noun. So kalap 'hat' with ok added changes meaning to the plural kalapok 'hats'. Inflection is also used to indicate case and possession being added in order to the noun.

Adjectives

Adjectives are either Attributive or Predicative. Used predicatively an adjective comes before the noun which it describes (and does not decline).

a piros autó	the red car
zöld kártya	green card
nagy ház	big house

piros 'red', zöld 'green', nagy 'big'.

Hungarian Possessives

Endings are added onto the noun (after the suffix indicating number but before that indicating case). So, 'flat' is 'lakás' and 'my flat' is 'lakásom', with the vowel plus -m providing the 'me' component.

Links

Hungarian Reference A guide to the Hungarian language with a useful section on Hungarian grammar.

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