Becoming Proficient in the Hungarian Language
Note: At the time of writing this post, it's been about a year since I took my Hungarian Citizenship Oath. To celebrate, I'm writing a 10-part series of posts with details of my citizenship process. I hope this will help and inspire others. See Part 1 and Part 2
There's no "hack" or "easy fix" for learning to speak, read and write Hungarian. The only way to do it is to commit to spending the time, then follow through. In this blog post, I'll outline how I did it, but it's important to note that there are many different languge learning styles and strategies. I already knew what strategies would work probably best for me, but that didn't stop me from trying out some other methods as well.
When I was 15 years old, I was accepted into the Rotary Youth Exchange program, moved to Brazil for a year, and became fluent in Portuguese within a few months, just by making friends in school and talking to my host families. So I knew, from experience, that speaking and listening would be the best method for me to get better at Hungarian too.
As I mentioned in my earlier posts, I had been l practicing with the Pimsleur App, (affiliate)
and it was very helpful in attuning my ear to Hungarian. I also was working through
this book (affiliate) which was great in helping me understand the complicated vowel harmony part of Hungarian grammar. But I felt I needed a teacher, and the accountabilty of a class, to get myself ready for the citizenship interview.
I found the Magyar Iskola Budapest online and made an appointment for a language assessment. One afternoon, I received a phone call from Budapest, and spoke, solely in Hungarian, to a woman from the school.
When I say I "spoke solely in Hungarian" I mean she asked me questions in Hungarian, most of which I could not answer!
However, I was able to understand a couple of questions like "What's your name?" and "What's your phone number?" and answer them appropriately! I could even spell my name and say all my numbers, thanks to the practice I'd been doing on letters and numbers in the Pimsleur App.
So to my delight, I was able to skip the very basic intro to Hungarian level and jump into a A1.2 class! I started this class, meeting three-times a week, in May 2020.
(For my readers outside of Europe: don't worry if you don't know what A1.2 means....I didn't either until I started studying Hungarian. But I quickly found out about the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching Assessment. It's a guideline used to describe and evaluate a student's level of understanding of a language that is not their native tongue. The scale goes from level A1 to level C2, with scales within each level.)
Throughout the Spring and Summer of 2020, I continued studying online at the Magyar Iskola. One fun thing about this school is that at the end of each course, you take a test, online, monitored by the teacher, and get a certificate if you pass! Certificates were fun and inspiring to me.
But when Fall 2020 came, I got some teaching work, and was no longer available to go to the online Hungarian classes, which took place in the afternoon for me. (Budapest is 6 hours ahead of the US East Coast, so their "evening classes" were afternoon-time for me.) I was sad because I had made several good friends in my classes! Thankfully, we remain friends today.
SIDE NOTE: One of the best things about my Hungarian citizenship journey has been the friends I have made along the way. I encourage you to find your people too!
While searching for a class that would work with my schedule, I kept studying Hungarian on my own through various methods: Tandem, Catch Budapest, and Hungarize. I even met weekly on Zoom with my friends from class in Budapest for grammar study groups.
I also followed many Hungarian language teachers on Instagram, including the awesome Hungarian with Sziszi, who inspired me to take on a huge challenge, completely changing the way I practiced Hungarian and giving my language skills a huge boost.
It's really quite simple, but Sziszi got me started practicing every single day.
In January 2021, Sziszi launched an Instagram challenge to post a video, in Hungarian, every day for a month. And I did it! The improvement I saw in my language skills was huge. So I started on the method of everyday practice with tracking...just simply checking it off on my calendar. Even today, a year after becoming a citizen, I give myself monthly challenges in Hungarian - each time seeing big improvements
In March of 2021, I returned to regular grammar clases online, in my time zone, with the Hungarian Library in New York, and in July of 2021 started intensive, one-on-one practice for my Hungarian language interview with Hungarian Language Solutions. At this point, I was studying about two hours a day with a mix of grammar practice, reading, speaking and listening. It was intense but also fun! I found podcasts and movies in Hungarian that interested me. I rehearsed my interview, and felt so good every time I used correct grammar to speak. All of this prepared me to go to Budapest in August of 2021, to submit my citizenship application, in Hungarian, at a government office.
But learning Hungarian wasn't my only task. I had to prepare many, many documents for the application....that's the next post in this series.....stay tuned.
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