Customer Reviews

Hungarian: An Essential Grammar (Essential Grammars)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I found this book to be amazingly useful after I had mastered the basics. It clears up a lot of rules and exceptions that other books tend to glaze over. I've heard people complain that it uses too much linguistic jargon, but guess what: you don't need to know what a linguist calls something to know how to use it. It would be difficult to use starting out, in that it does assume you know quite a bit off the bat.

Also, what's all this confusion about cases in other reviews? Anyone who's studied the language would know that most of the so-called 24 "cases" in Hungarian aren't like the cases you'd find in German, Russian, or even English. Case, in a traditional sense, is required by the grammar but doesn't affect meaning. In German the only difference between "Ich liebe du" and "Ich liebe dich" is that the grammar demands you say "dich." The locative cases in Hungarian aren't cases in this traditional sense. There's a difference in meaning between "Megyek a boltBA" and "Megyek a boltBÓL, máshova...", but the grammar doesn't require you use one not the other to make the sentence sound right. If anything, I find Hungarian cases to be easier than German or English, because I don't have to memorize gender variants and they're not there solely for the grammar.

Cases more so differ from postpositions in that they're attached to the word and follow vowel harmony. Every textbook teaches the two separately. I think the book is excellently organized, in that I could easily find whatever topic I was looking for by chapter heading.

You need all the help you can get when trying to learn Hungarian and it is hard to imagine a better grammar than this one. It is very complete yet all explanations are perfectly clear - no jargon - and accompanied by straightforward examples. The general layout is first-rate: answers to the many problems of learning are easy to find thanks to good chapter layout and a comprehensive index.

I have used other Hungarian grammar books (smaller, easier to carry) and I got this one based on the author's "Colloquial Hungarian" textbook. This grammar is clear and comprehensive and satisfying. Such books are not 'read' but investigated, and so far I am delighted.

This is certainly the best and most accessible concise grammar of Hungarian in English currently available, and the new (2009) edition is a noteworthy improvement on the first (2001). It is usually clear, avoids jargon when it can, and has a wealth of examples. Users should, however, be warned that for a work of reference it still contains far too many misprints and editing flaws, some straightforward errors, and -- although most of the sentence examples are fresh, useful and idiomatic -- some are grammatically incorrect and/or not accurately or felicitously glossed.

Excellent! Perfect for the Hungarian speaker who wants to learn, or refresh their language skills, especially while using the Hungarian TV shows online. This book is great for easy quick reference.

This book is an essential reference for anyone studying Hungarian. It covers grammar with understandable explanations and examples making all elements of the language approachable. The index is sufficiently detailed to be able to find the desired explanation without having to leaf through the book in search of answers.

this book is a fairly decent descriptive grammar of the hungarian language. as a person who has studied the finnish language at length and now dabbles in some of the other uralic languages like sami and hungarian, this book is easy to use if you already have a rather clear picture of the linguistics of this language family. turkish, although in possession of vowel harmony, is not a member of the uralic language family, as magellan suggests - it is an altaic language family member. research has been done to show that these two language families are in fact one, but so far the evidence has been inconclusive.

The book is very well structured and is aimed at a level where the details of linguistics are fairly well understood. It is not a book from which you could learn how to converse in Hungarian but details how the sentences and syntax form and vary to elicit subtleties and variations of the language. Probably aimed at a level where the user is already capable of speaking and understanding Hungarian to an average degree.

I have a bookcase full of language books: French, Italian, Hebrew, German and even several English grammar books. I read them regularly. This book is one of the best language books I have ever read. The clarity with which the almost impossibly difficult Hungarian grammar is explained is astonishing. At the price, this has to be the best buy you can get.

A quick word to the prospective reader: You belong to one of four groups. You are a scholar - get the book for sure. You are a native speaker who wants to formalize their knowledge of the language - get the book. You are an interested amateur linguist who wants to find out what makes the language tick - highly recommended.

You are someone who want's to learn the language. Possibly you have already picked up some other languages like French or Spanish and you feel adventurous or you want to travel to the banks of the Danube - forget it! Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages to learn. As I said, the grammar is impossible, the pronunciation is even worse and the language resembles nothing that a Western speaker has ever come across.

I am warning you with some sadness. Spending a few hours with this book has convinced me that after fifty plus years of speaking and reading the language I still know less than nothing about it. A great book does that to you sometimes.

I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to use this space for a pure response, but I'm wondering what the Reader from NY suggests as an alternative of case endings. Does he or she suggest that the language be changed so that the locatives and other case-endings become separate words? Postpositions? I would caution one against thinking to change the language to make it easier for an english speaker to learn. It's not as if some loony grammarian decided that some things are attached to words and some things are not: that's all part of the language. As a student of Finnish, I am quite familiar with this sort of case-ending particle: it's just something you have to get used to. I admit to enjoying the technical terms as a part of grammar study (as well as to being a Latin student) but they do not seem in any way necessary to the study of the language if they seem confusing. Finnish has an "inessive particle" which means you add -ssa/ssä to the end of a word when you're saying that something is in it, but there's no need to memorize the fact that it is called inessive: you just have to know that when you want to say "I am in bed" or "I live in Helsinki" you have to say "Olen sängyssä" and "Asun Helsingissa." If I have your complaint misinterpreted I apologise for the mistake, but I absolutely love the Finnish Grammar from this series which gets very technical about grammar and think that that is what a grammar reference should do, whether or not the student feels it helpful to use the technical terms provided.

(NB: Finnish also has "post-positions," so that you say "sängyn alla" for "under the bed" (literally "[the] bed's under"), but I find it easier just to consider it a word meaning "under" and to remember that the other word has to be in the posessive/genitive than to start worrying about whether to call it a post-position or a case ending (although of course, the former is correct).)