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Yes our alphabet is absolute shit. S is sh, sz is s, zs is like s in pleasure. Of course english is much worse but hungarian is a strange combination of having a goofy alphabet and writing in general but it actually follows its own rules so its predictable and hungarians will always write the same thing in the same way. Other goofy things about the hungarian alphabet and writing:
- there are letters that are actually 2 or 3 letters combined like sz, cs, ty, dzs, etc
- even tho we have ty, ny, gy, ly; the traditional hungarian alphabet does not contain y(even tho we have some names with y in them but they come from other languages) so some old hungarian fonts only contain a small y and not the capital version Y
- yes we have a letter that is made up of three and in some cases due to grammar you can have a version that is 4 letters long. This is because we have long and short consonants. So cs becomes ccs and sz becomes ssz and in very very rare cases the dzs can become ddzs which is horrifying. But we of course have words which have a a doubled up version instead of a long version because they are compound words so instead of kulccsomó its kulcscsomó
Spanish is similar. Things are pronounced the way they are written. Made learning it way easier than my friends who went the other direction learning english.
Yeah im so happy i grew up in ireland and hungary so i know english to a native level. Hungarian is just a cool conversation starter. I had one year of spanish and the whole phonetic system is really easy, my only problem was the 1 million different conjugations you had to learn. From what i heard english is still worse because you just kinda imply tenses and most people dont have the feel for it.
There's always a trade-off that makes it difficult it seems. I struggle mightily with Spanish conjugation and gender without having to think about it. In English those two are much less of a concern, but at the cost of having a much stricter word order requirement and our mishmash of word pronunciation from all the French loanwords.
English used to have that. The -eths and -ests that people tack onto random words in a terrible attempt to evoke Early Modern English are supposed to follow similar rules to Spanish verb endings because they're fundamentally the same thing.
Hard disagree. Your alphabet slaps and once you learn the rules, pronounciation is crystal clear from the way something is written.
Its kinda strange because most foreigners who know about hungarian think its a pretty cool little language but in hungary they have to make it a nationalism thing for some reason and that alienates the youth. Like in school they still have to point out the fact that technically Q W X Y is not a part of the alphabet so dont use words with it(a lot of surnames literally have y's in them...). While in sweden where i live now everyone uses whatever they want because language is about expressing yourself.
When I was in Budapest on a school trip in 2002, I remember being so relieved upon realizing that our tram stop was pretty much pronounced the way it was written: Nepliget
EDIT: Now that I think about it, maybe the T was silent? It feels like a lifetime ago, so I don't remember.
Loved the city and the street food, by the way. Sausages were a dirt cheap and delicious snack when just loafing around the city.
Yeah Népliget lol. The t isnt silent. Hungarian doesnt really have silent letters but some letter combinations have rules for easier pronounciation like adta is pronounced atta usually. Sometimes the n on the end of a word is left off in speech but in places where this is common they sometimes even call this a dialect and write it that way because if you dont hear it you wont write it down.
Good ol' Knee-Ply-Get.
not that i speak either but it's not like Japanese or Mandarin don't have confusing constructs either.