TRANSCRIPTION: http://chiaralanguagefreak.com/2023/05/25/hungarian-and-online-communities/

Hungarian was another one of my great language “love stories”. It was the first one that made me show up on the Internet and allowed me to realize its potential.

Once again, it started with a trip to Budapest. However, unlike the case of Russian I explained in the previous episodes, I was not prepared ahead of it, but I got curious only once back.

I got interested in it because I had put Russian aside since it was too difficult to learn on your own (I mean, I was 15 and had no clue about “cases”, declensions, verbal aspects, and so on… it was really too much of a mess).

I remember I had gone to a bookshop in my town and asked for a Chinese and Russian phrasebook, which I still have!

After that journey, I went to that place and asked for a Hungarian one. In that case or shortly after, I also got a small dictionary that I used so much that now is almost torn in pieces - but of course, I am keeping it as a memory for the rest of my life.

My curiosity came from some things told by our guide in Budapest. She was great, but she had just given some information about the language: the typical info like that it’s a far relative of the Finnish language and so on… the basic stuff you tell a group of not-so-young Italians on holiday.

But, for me, that was enough.

Again, the sound of the language was crucial in making me like what I was learning.

Another point that “triggered” me positively was that while I was getting information about the language, a pretty frequent point was that it was super difficult. My typical reaction in these cases, still nowadays, is: that’s bullshit. So, I saw it as a challenge I wanted to defy. If I could learn it, that meant it was not that hard 🙂