Budapest, the capital of Hungary, has become one of those popular destinations for those traveling around Europe. The city’s beautiful architecture has earned it the nickname “Pearl of the Danube.”
As a result, many people —including those planning to travel to Hungary— ask whether Hungarian is a difficult language.
The short answer is yes. Hungarian is a hard language because it is not an Indo-European language.
The short answer, unfortunately, has linguistic jargon that needs explaining. So, let me provide a slightly longer answer.
The difficulty of learning a foreign language depends on how different that language is from your native language.
If your native language is English —which is not unlikely given that you are reading this— then Hungarian is linguistically very different from your native language.
To understand why Hungarian is so different from English, it helps to know about language families.
You might have never heard of language families, but surely you have heard of biological evolution. Nearly everyone has. There is no need to have read Darwin’s treatise “On the Origin of Species” to be familiar with the concept.
Well, just as biologists classify plants and animals based on their evolution, linguists classify languages into families based on how those languages evolved.
For example, Spanish and French are similar languages because they both evolved from Latin.
Another example is Swedish and Norwegian, which are also similar languages because both evolved from Old Norse, the language of the Vikings.
Languages can be related without being direct descendants of the same ancient language, just as humans can be related without being siblings (like cousins, second-degree cousins, uncle-and-nephew, etc.).
People with an interest in genealogy (those who study their own family history) often draw diagrams called family trees. Similarly, language families can also be represented as tree-like diagrams.
English is a Germanic language, and Germanic languages are part of the larger Indo-European language family.
Hungarian is not in the Indo-European language family. That’s why Hungarian is so different from English. And that is also why Hungarian is so difficult to learn.
To understand how significant this is, one must realize just how vast the Indo-European language family really is.
Most of the languages spoken in Europe are Indo-European languages. Hungarian is one of the few exceptions (Finnish and Estonian are two other exceptions).
The Indo-European language language family also includes Persian, Russian, and several of the languages spoken in India, such as Hindi and Bengali.
So, the English language is more closely related to Perian, Russian, and Hindi than it is to Hungarian. That says a lot. And, in light of that, it is easy to intuit that Hungarian might be a very complicated language to learn if you are a native English speaker (or a native speaker of any Indo-European language, for that matter).
So, Hungarian is not an Indo-European language. But you might be wondering why exactly that means that Hungarian is a difficult language to learn.
Well, the first aspect is the vocabulary. If you look at the thousand most common Hungarian words, you will quickly notice that very few of them are similar to their English equivalents.
In contrast, languages like German, French, and Spanish have many words that are similar to their English translations. Those similar words are easier to recognize and to memorize.
Because Hungarian has hardly any words that are similar to English, learning Hungarian vocabulary is more difficult.
It is not just the vocabulary that is difficult when learning Hungarian. The grammar is challenging as well. Hungarian has 18 grammatical cases. For comparison, German has four, and Latin has six.
The easy aspects of learning Hungarian are few. But we can point out that Hungarian does use a version of the Latin alphabet (English also uses a version of the Latin alphabet).
So when you learn Hungarian, you don’t have to memorize an entirely new alphabet as you would have to do if you were learning Hindi or Persian.
Another easy aspect is that Hungarian doesn’t have grammatical gender.
Hungarian is often listed among the hardest languages (for English speakers to learn).
But it’s certainly not the hardest.
According to the language difficulty ratings of the Foreign Service Institute, Hungarian is in the category of “Hard languages” (Category 3), while Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Arabic are in the category of “Super-hard languages” (Category 4).