Wednesday, 28 May 2008

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 :(

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