How Difficult Is It to Learn Hungarian?

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Why do people say Hungarian is the hardest language?

Tell people you’re trying to learn Hungarian and you may well get a shocked expression, even from the locals. They will urgently (or proudly?) try and discourage you by telling you it’s the hardest language in the world. Something’s difficulty is subjective, but why has Hungarian in particular got itself this reputation? Mainly it’s because it’s completely different from all its European neighbours. While most European languages belong to the Indo-European language family, Hungarian is a Uralic language. This means that apart from modern loan words, it has no similarity to any languages outside this family.

Is Hungarian related to Estonian & Finnish?

Estonian and Finnish are the two other European languages that are part of the Uralic family, so it’s correct to say they share a linguistic history. However as modern languages, while Estonian and Finnish grew up together, Hungarian has followed a very different path and now shares almost no similarity to its cousins. That is to say that, if you are familiar with Estonian or Finnish, it’s not going to help you learn Hungarian.

Let’s look at the easy and hard parts of Hungarian

Some people take to different parts of learning a language more easily than others. Hungarian is a grammar-intensive language, so if you’re one of those rare types of people that enjoys staring at language charts then you might not find it so bad.