Hungarian Class

Lately in Hungarian we've been learning about suffixes.
- We've covered the suffixes that you add to make a word plural.  In Hungarian you pluralize adjectives, if they come after the noun. 

- We've learned how to conjugate verbs. There are at least 11 different ways to do this. And then there are what we call the "Ick Verbs" or irregular verbs that do not follow the regular rules of conjugation and have their own set of rules.

- Next we learned the suffix that you add to show that a word is the direct object in the sentence. This, for the most part, is actually pretty simple.

(if you're confused at this point, and are about ready to forget about the Hungarian language for the rest of your life, keep reading, it gets better...) 

- Then last week we learned that there are suffixes that that you add to a word to add a preposition to that word.  Here's an example. In English we might say, Into the store. In Hungarian it would look like this, A boltba. The word bolt means store, and you add the suffix ba to show that you are going into the the store. 

Hungarians really seem to love adding suffixes as often as possible. You can start out with a simple 4 letter word and by the time you've added all the suffixes it's a 17 letter word.

It all makes sense when you're talking in Hungarian, but when you're thinking and talking in Hungarian/English and trying to sort things out it gets confusing sometimes.



This week, we learned how to tell time.
It's actually very entertaining when you think about it, and that's exactly what you have to do, think about it.
In English if you wanted to know what time it was I would say "It's 12:14"
In Hungarian... we would say "It's one minute until 45 minutes until 1 o'clock" (I'm not even going to try and type that out in actual Hungarian)
And then there's the simple way of saying it " tizenket ora tizennegy perc." Which literally means "11:14" (even though it's 12:14, we still say that it's 11.)
The way our teacher explained it was that even though it's 12 we've passed 12 and are now in the 11th hour.

It's all VERY confusing at first, but once you start wrapping your head around it, and it starts to click then it can be really fun.
Still very confusing at times, but I'm learning... slowly, and it is fun.
And the more we learn, the more we're able to laugh at our mistakes.

(anybody wanna guess what any of this means?)

Last week our teacher was having us translate Hungarian sentences into English, and then English into Hungarian. We were each supposed to take a sentence and then translate it.
It ended up that one of us would start translating, then get stuck, and the rest of us would help out. By the end of the lesson we were pretty much just going through the sentences and each of us was translating one word. So we made a joke that now we can finally go and talk to a Hungarian as long as we're all together so that we can help each other out.-- And yes, even when we're all being totally serious, it does sometimes take all 6 of us to translate one sentence. 

I'm still laughing at the fact that I randomly decided to pull out my camera in the middle of class and start snapping away, and my teacher didn't mind. So I turned Hungarian class into a mini photo-shoot. :)