Hungarian Language Update

A while back I wrote about using cheat sheets for my market excursions in the hopes I would improve my Hungarian over these quick grocery exchanges. The results have been mixed. I get perplexed looks. People laugh at me. Others sympathetically shake their heads at me.

An example:

I went to the metro station to buy my monthly pass with one of my cheat sheets. As I inched towards the lady behind the glass, I practiced in my head what I would say. When I got to the counter I read my cheat sheet aloud. She stared blankly at me. I tried again. Another blank stare and people behind me in the queue began shifting awkwardly. I showed her my sad, little handwritten cheat sheet and she seemed to understand.

“Student or normal? Student, yeah?” she asked, nodding her head as she stamping my pass.

“Normal,” I muttered.

Growing up with landed immigrants in Canada, I understood how hard it was to learn English. The slang, the endless exceptions and the phrasal verbs. All made more difficult when they must communicate with native English speakers who completely neglect their grammar and syntax. 

But learning to speak Hungarian seems more like learning how to speak all over again. Vowels have accents that change how they sound and, therefore, the entire meaning of the word changes. I tell taxi drivers to take me to Vaci utca and Fővám tér. The exchange ends a lot like the one with the metro lady: Awkwardly.

Anyway, English has no accents. English just assumes you know whether it’s a hard vowel or soft vowel. However flawed this system is, I'm used to it.

The consonants are a whole excruciating ordeal too, especially for me, the native English-speaking mono-linguist. For example, 'cs' in Hungarian makes a ch sound. A 'dzs' makes a j sound. When I'm looking for cheese, I'm looking for a label that says sajt, which is pronounced shite. 

As a native English speaker, I fluently speak the world’s most common second language. It is the lingua franca. It’s a blessing. Like my time in Montreal, people here can get the general idea across to me in English, but, unlike in Montreal, I cannot do the same in Hungarian.

And there's the rub. I have no other frame of reference for pronouncing Hungarian. Sure, I have those petite French language skills, but that’s not even near a business-level of functioning, and I have met France French speakers who frown upon my Quebecois twang.

So I take my cheat sheets. I read the odd food label. I work on my counting. I fumble. I mumble. I stammer. I mispronounce. I get laughed at. I laugh. But I have acknowledged that living here means being functionally illiterate. And I'm not alright with that.