Customer Reviews

Colloquial Hungarian (Colloquial Series)

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The book starts with pronunciation exercises, and then consists of a series of lessons, each of which simulates a common scenario setting (restaurants, gas station, etc). It presents new vocabulary and a few grammatical rules along the way. It makes for easy reading, and along with the tape can get you started easily into the language. However, if you want something more than "survival hungarian", you will need to go on to an intermediate book. The learnings from this book will not allow you to have a full conversation, but only to interact as a tourist in Hungary.

The book starts with pronunciation exercises, and then consists of a series of lessons, each of which simulates a common scenario setting (restaurants, gas station, etc). It presents new vocabulary and a few grammatical rules along the way. It makes for easy reading, and along with the tape can get you started easily into the language. However, if you want something more than "survival hungarian", you will need to go on to an intermediate book. The learnings from this book will not allow you to have a full conversation, but only to interact as a tourist in Hungary.

Routledge's COLLOQUIAL HUNGARIAN offers just what its title suggests, a presentation of everyday spoken Hungarian. Any attempt to teach oneself such a complex language as Hungarian is going to require several textbooks, as a variety of approaches to aspects of the language help avoid confusion. COLLOQUIAL HUNGARIAN certainly deserves a place among one's materials. Whether or not it will be your primary textbook depends on your experience with foreign languages.

COLLOQUIAL HUNGARIAN moves along very quickly, a single one of its lessons offers enough information for three units in other textbooks. It's just the sort of book that the linguistics geek, with a few other languages under his belt, might find ideal. Grammatical concepts are presented in a straightforward, no-nonsense manner. Too bad this rigorous method was lost in Routledge's subsequent edition of the course (written that time by Carol Rounds).

If, however, you are just a normal guy compelled by some twist of fate to learn Hungarian, I recommend TEACH YOURSELF HUNGARIAN.

I think this book is great. However, the complexity of Hungarian requires a LOT of study, and hence, I recommend you get the cassette with it, and play it over and over and over and over again until the pronunciation exercises and first two dialogues make you sick. Once you have done this, the material in the book is much clearer, and like the other reviewer said, allows you to learn and get into Hungarian very quickly. Stuff I learnt in chapters 1 and 2 of this book I use regularly in Hungary and it seems to work! Be prepared for two months of vowel sound learning though - not a fault of the book, but the fact that Hungarian is very hard to pronounce, learn and understand - but nothing ventured...I do it for fun and I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to start - the dialogues are also funny, though I don't think anyone says "elvtars" in Hungary anymore - making this slightly outdated, but very enjoyable!!