Customer Reviews

Colloquial Hungarian: The Complete Course for Beginners (Colloquial Series)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I studied from Erika Solyom's book while studying in Budapest, Hungary. For me, learning the Hungarian language seemed to be a very intimidating task, but Colloquial Hungarian made the process much easier, even fun. The characters, dialogues, cultural items and poetry included in the book expose the reader to Hungarian culture which helped me have a deeper understanding of the Hungarian lanuage. I strongly recommend this book.

This is a great beginner's book, but not a novice's book. Its teaching is clear and the examples are excellent. Despite claiming to be for beginners, it starts at a little higher level than does Pontifex's book, and goes a little further. As a complete novice you may, therefore, wish to read Pentifex's book first. For example, this book goes as far as detailing the hat/het and the at/tat/et/tet grammars. The grammar does not go as far as Whitney's 1964 gem.

The book gives complete translations for the readings in the first 3 or 4 chapters, after which the pace is stepped-up considerably and no translations are given. The exercises are not as many or as varied in style as Pontifex's.

The quality of the explanation of concepts is second-to-none, but like many other books this suffers from giving a reading that introduces a new concept before that concept is explained. I personally don't like this style, as it may leave the read going around in circles trying to understand (or trying to remember their non-existent understanding of) the grammar. It also suffers from introducing words that exemplify a concept but are not particularly useful in everyday (NB. "Colloquial Hungarian") conversation, such as "parrot".

After the readings a useful, alphabetical glossary is given, but like so many other books it assumes that the reader has a perfect memory and does not remind him of words mentioned in previous glossaries. This means that lots of flicking to the dictionary is necessary for those with imperfect (or otherwise full) minds.

At the end is a good dictionary (but unlike Whitney's dictionary it is not integrated with an index), full conjugation tables of the big seven irregular verbs, tables of examples of irregular (e.g. vowel-dropping) nouns in various cases, etc.

The book has optional audio CDs but I do not own these.

I was fortunate to have Erika Solyom as my professor. I believe Colloquial Hungarian is the best book on the market to teach the difficult language of Hungarian: it is easy to follow, uses relevant and sensible dialogs and life situations, and uses cultural elements in an accessible plot. The book is very dense, covering most grammatical rules found in the Hungarian language; however, this allows the book to accomplish both depth and breadth. The reader is able to set his or her own pace and learn what they find relevant. Realistically, I would say, to have a very comprehensible/survival understanding, one should complete chapters one through five in about one semester (fifteen weeks). Though dense, the book is geared for self-paced education with constant review and digestion. Hungarian is not a language to be learned in a matter of weeks (as the Hungarians will proudly point out). However, Colloquial Hungarian gives a great overview and insight into the fascinating language.

Listening to the tape and trying to follow in the book is difficult. The conversations are very rapid and perhaps this is better for someone who already has the fundamentals down.

I've been using this book as my main language learning vehicle for over two years.
After losing my first instructor and a several month delay I started over again.
The first 100 pages or so goes pretty fast and then the book seems to both change
gears and become increasingly difficult. You really have to want to learn Hungarian
to get much past this point. I have found it useful but I also find myself looking for another solution. I find no excuse for the many spelling errors in a language
book.

I've got to admit, the book is great, the text is follow-able after listening to the dialogs a couple of times, but it could have been a little more conversational, implementing more basic expressions, and the grammar could be more thoroughly organized.

As with the Routledge series, they're not very big on extra dialog material (those without previous knowledge of the language are somewhat at a loss) as for two CD's could hold a lot more spoken dialog than they do.

The conversations were fun and upbeat and the book itself is very well written, only flaw is that it could have been a little more "basic".

it was supposed to be "colloquial" but was very complicated for our eight college students to use. They attempted pre-study and also did some work during our orientation, but even the Hungarian-speaking leader found it extremely difficult to grasp. we are looking for something better now.

This book, as I said earlier, is the best small, self study book to learn Hungarian from. My grandparents are from Hungary, and my mother speaks it, so I had the advantage of having a native speaker to practice what I learned with. The grammar in this book is given in very simple, bitesized, easily digestible tidbits. They are small enough to tuck into your memory and then remember it at the needed moment.

This book also has many real life example, such as poems, songs etc. These help, because they give a sense of how the language REALLY is, outside the context of obviously artificial dialouges.

I would like to be fair and put one drawback to this book. The the truth is I can't think of one. This book is a truly marvelous addition to the effort to learn such a unique and sometimes difficult language.

I have really enjoyed using this text and the accompanying CDs. It does move very quickly, but it makes Hungarian much easier to learn than I had anticipated! I am using this book in conjunction with instruction by a tutor; I'm not sure how well a beginner would do without some additional assistance.

This book is easy to follow, doesn't overcrowd the pages with information, is written with humour and encourages the student along the way. I do not have the audio cassettes for this book, however I would definitely recommend you purchase them too, as listening to foreign speakers and trying to imitate their accent is essential when learning a foreign language, especially one like Hungarian where intonation and stress are so important.

Colloquial Hungarian is an excellent starting point for your Hungarian language experience.