Is anyone able to recommend any books for learning Hungarian? I have got Teach Yourself and the CD's which are fine for pronounciation but hopeless for grammar. What I particularly need is a good course teaching grammar constructions and a good dictionary. Any ideas? Anna

Personally, I found Jerry Payne's Colloquial Hungarian text superior to TY Hungarian. It's not technically a grammar, but there is a lot of grammatical information in it including an extensive treatment of derivation morphology (i.e. how to form new words by means of prefixes and suffixes).

I quite like Beginner's Hungarian. It's got a lot of grammar goodness.

As for a dictionary, I like Hungarian Practical Dictionary

Many thanks for your suggestions - I'll try and get those books. Anna

Jó napot kívánok!

I would also like to learn Hungarian one day. Most of the documents and books where I live that were written prior to the end of World War I are written in Hungarian. Whole encyclopaedias and journals lying there in the library's archive and no one to read them.

I'm also 1/8 Hungarian and that great grandfather was also my namesake. And all I can say is good day?!

Once a friend of mine asked me if I could translate a brief passage in Hungarian (from the movie Chicago) and I got an Oxford Hungarian-Dictionary from the library. (I did this partly as a favour to her and also because I was really curious to see how the language worked.) That was a good dictionary, and my translation wasn't too off (I also submitted it to a language forum). Trouble is, I couldn't seem to find this dictionary online when I just searched for it. But if you see an Oxford Hungarian-English dictionary, buy it.

And good luck with Hungarian. It's a fascinating language, very unique.

This passage?

"Mit keresek, enn itt? Azt mondjok, hogy lakem lefogta a ferjemet
en meg lecsaptam a fejet. De nem igaz, en artatlan vagyok. Nem
tudom mert mondja Uncle Sam hogy en tetten. Probaltam a rendorsegen
megmagyarazni de nem ertettek meg"

Yep.

It was a real pain to translate too, because I wasn't familiar with agglutinative grammar (in fact I'm still not really) but I got something somewhat close to the original meaning.

I love taking a good look at a language completely unrelated to my own, because since all of the morphemes are unfamiliar to me I can see how words are derived without having to worry about trying to figure out their meanings. And languages like Hungarian take word derivation to extremes.

Hungarians are Slovaks' ancient enemies. My Slovak ancestors have been under Hungarian rule for almost a thousand years, roughly from 955 to 1918. Nationalistic tensions are high even today.

A funny thing is that Slovaks consider Hungarian language to be the hardest one, while the Hungarians think the same of Slovak.

I've been away at a conference the last few days, but have just got home and am catching up on posts. Thanks for the new ones. I shouldn't have too much trouble with agglutination as I've been learning Finnish for over a year now. One of the things I am keeping an eye open for are the similarities between Finnish and Hungarian.

Yes, neighbours often are/have been enemies in the past. Until the 20th century, the 'main' enemies of the English were the French. And don't get me started on the Welsh and the English...!