Flash cards

I've been preoccupied lately with playing around with the iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store... I'm playing with a flashcard program:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=284324015&mt=8

I'm planning to add three flashcards a day to my deck, and slowly build vocabulary. I'll share the flashcards here once a week or so in case they make a useful resource to any other iPhone-wielding Hungarian studier - there must be more than one... surely? :)

A numbers exercise

Following on from the last post about learning a cheatsheet of words to help with pronunciation, I noticed something when reading through the cardinal numbers. Many of the vowel sounds (at least what appear to be the most common) and a couple of the most useful compound sounds appear in the numbers 0 to 10. Take a look:

Number	Hungarian	Pronounced	Remember for
0	nulla	nul-lo	u,a
1	egy	edju	e,gy
2	kettö	ket-tur	ö
3	három	haa-rawm	á,o
4	négy	naydju	é
5	öt	urt
6	hat	hot
7	hét	hayt
8	nyolc	nyawlts	ny,c
9	kilenc	ki-lents
10	tíz	teez	í

Too many vowels

A common method I'm using for remembering the pronunciation of each of the vowels is word association - learn a word which demonstrates the sound well. I hope at some point these pronunciations become second nature, but while I wait for that moment to arrive I can recall one of the words in the list below to jog my memory.

So here's my list so far:

Vowel	Example	Phonetically	Translation
a	anya	ahnyah	mum
á	hát	huut	why
e	nem	nem	no
é	kék	kayk	blue
i	igen	eegen	yes
í	víz	veez	water
o	hol	hawl	where
ó	ló	laaw	horse
ö
ő
u
ú
ü
ű

These are working for me so far, but I'd be interested to hear what works for others. I used a couple of useful resources when putting together this list:

• Teach Yourself Hungarian by Zsuzsu Pontifex


• Hungarian Pronunciation Guide

First steps with pronunciation

Here's a pleasant surprise - despite being regarded one of the most difficult languages to learn, pronunciation in Hungarian seems to be fairly straight-forward. There are none of the linguistic traps of other European languages with silent letters and apparent but misleading rhymes like 'some' and 'home' in English. It seems to be a 'what-you-see-is-what-you-get' (or phonemic orthography) language, that is, learn to pronounce the consonants (relatively easy), vowels (yikes, so many!), and compound letters (not too tricky) and you'll be able to have a go at even the most intimidating Hungarian word or phrase.

So pronunciation seems like a sensible place to start... next post I'll share what I've learnt about vowel pronunciation, but be warned, there are more than you'd probably expect :(

Everybody has to start somewhere...

I recently decided to take my first steps on the long, tricky journey towards speaking Hungarian. The first thing that I discovered was that this is, unsurprisingly, a route far less trodden than , say, French or Spanish. The online resources available are fairly limited, and even good old-fashioned books aren't exactly abundant.

So, resigning myself to the fact that I wasn't going to find the silver bullet of a Michel Thomas style "learn-Hungarian-in-a-week" course, I decided I'd need to tread my own path making the most of each and every resource I can find.

In this blog, I plan to record all those little successes and failures along the way, along with reviews of other resources such as websites, books, and products I try, as well as any resources (such as audio and text vocabulary flash cards) I produce myself.

If you want to find out more about me, or share your own experiences, contribute your own material to the site, or even just simply attempt some Hungarian chatter then take a look at the "About Me" section.

Thanks for reading, and I wish you luck :)