First Hungarian Lesson

I started learning Hungarian this week after six months of living with the hope that I’d magically be able to converse with locals, despite an absolute lack of effort.  This is not completely impossible, to an extent.  It is actually quite common to pick up large amounts of language passively.  For example, I know that “tolni” means push.  In my first week here, I had a man yell it at me as I found myself unable to open a door.  At first I freaked out, wondering what type of insult “tolni” could mean; I’d at least worked out that he was yelling at me because of my clear stupidity of not being able to open a door, but after a second or a minute— time ceases to move in these freak-out moments— I noticed that there was a small sign above the handle, saying the same word.  Naturally, I continued pulling on the door.  The man said it again and I figured I should take a new strategy, pushing the door.  That worked; the door opened.  I turned back to the guy, slapped my forehead gently with my palm and exclaimed with a laugh, “Tolni!”, as if I was merely unobservant or stupid, not foreign.

Honestly though, besides knowing the words for nearly every vegetable one can find in this country (the markets have clearly marked signs above each bin), my Hungarian is about nil.  This is not purely from laziness.  When I first arrived, I had every intention of studying Hungarian for an hour every day.  I believe that when one plans to live in a country for four years, they should at least learn how to say to a cashier, “Hey, what do you think of this particular cheese?”  As it stands, I can look at the cashier and say, “Cheese?”  After just a day or two here, realizing I needed flashcards just to say thank you (köszönöm) and that the language has anywhere between 12 and 33 vowels (I swear they add more every few days, just to confuse me), I gave up on any serious study of the language.  Especially considering that even when I know the word, even seemingly simple words like sör (beer), I am incomprehensible to Hungarians.  This is a common source of frustration to many of foreigners that live here.

There is a fantastic bakery near my flat.  Often in the morning, I’ll wonder down with my artist/”I-just-woke-up- and-want-some-bread” hair, point to a bread roll and exclaim, “Egy Zsemle!”  They give me a strange look as if I’m speaking some strange language and offer me something completely different.  I’ve observed the signs.  There is only one thing in the entire store that has a name even resembling Zsemle and that’s Zsemle.  So, even if I had managed to say something like music or bill or SIM-card, one would think in this context, that I was probably talking about the object to which I was pointing.  It’s like working at a store that cuts keys and having somebody come in and ask for kois.  I’d like to think that I wouldn’t spend two minutes glaring at the person, wondering why they think they can buy a fish at my key store.  Thankfully, the baker woman speaks English and we quickly drop any pretence that we’ll be able to communicate in Hungarian, and she just asks me what I want.  These are not confidence building events.

So when Babilon offered me Hungarian lessons on a teacher’s discount, I figured I should participate.  The first lesson was dedicated to introductions, numbers, and most importantly, pronouncing the different letters.  In just a few minutes, I discovered a reason why the baker couldn’t understand me: I couldn’t even say the word for one correctly.  I’d been saying “Egy” like egg-ee, when the “gy” is just one letter pronounced like the last sound of the English word “edge”.  Turns out I kept walking into the bakery saying something like “sky-music”.  If somebody asked me for sky-music in my key store, I’d probably call the police.

However, just taking Hungarian classes doesn’t make it an easy language.  I find that learning to count to ten in most languages is a simple process, taking little more than few minutes, but in Hungarian, it took me a good part of an afternoon.  They follow a logic I don’t understand.  In most languages, when you learn 1-10, the rest is quite easy.  Not in Hungarian.  After ten (tiz), it seems simple enough, eleven is tizenegy, twelve is tizenkettő, or simply ten-en-one, ten-en-two, etc.  Twenty though, is húsz, which isn’t derived from their word for two at all!  But at least it can follow the same formula, twenty-en-one, right?  Unfortunately no, it is huszonegy.  Thirty is harminc, but after forty, the rest gets much easier, if you can remember which ones end with ven or van.

Another oddity is that the third person seems to have optional verbs or optional subjects, depending on the sentence.  So, once I know a few more words, I still won’t know who anyone is taking about or what they are doing.

I was able to use my Hungarian immediately.  Last night, Michelle and I went to see Django Unchained.  The cinema had assigned seats, and when we reached ours, a woman had turned mine into her personal wardrobe, stashing her coat, candy, sodas, boyfriend’s gloves, scarf, and given this is Hungary, probably her small dog as well.  I didn’t know how to say, “Um, would you mind placing your things someplace else?  It is a Saturday night and the show is sold out, so unfortunately, there are no spares seats in this theatre for you to store your personal belongings.”  But, I did know the verb for “am” and the word for nine, my seat number.  So I meekly remarked, “kilenc vagyok!” or simple “nine am I”.   There is the slight possibility that I proposed the philosophical statement, “nine exists”, but either way, the woman seemed to understand and spent the next ten minutes transferring her massive pile of things out of my seat.