I learned some hungarian in my 20s. Tough language, but so beautiful.
I'd say there are some very weird things about the language. I had to wait until my second semester to be able to say "I have X". There's no such verb as "having" in hungarian, but you use possessive + being to indicate you have something. And we only learnt possessive suffixes in 2nd semester.
I'd say that something that helped a lot was that in early 2000s there wasn't that much people speaking English in Budapest. So, no cheating.
But also, trying to speak Hungarian would get people smiling at you for trying. People would say "But Hungarian is the most difficult language in the world!" (maybe not true, but I'd hear that a lot).
After a year and a half, I could communicate with my Mother in law, with some mistakes, but enough to get around and get complimented on my skills.
Couldn't continue living in Budapest, had to return to my home country in Latin America. But later in life, got the opportunity to move to Berlin. I thought "Well, I learnt Hungarian, I can learn German". How wrong I was.
Being able to cheat (Everybody speaks English) and trying to do this in your 30's is much harder.
Not only that, I guess what what made everything just not worthy was Germans giving you shit every time you make a mistake, or your 5-vowel mother language makes it hard to pronounce things. Not only that, but then if you make mistakes you get judged immediately as somebody that "didn't want to integrate". People would generalize and now, after 10 years. With 2 half-german daughters I don't want to learn the language.
I'd say there are some very weird things about the language. I had to wait until my second semester to be able to say "I have X". There's no such verb as "having" in hungarian, but you use possessive + being to indicate you have something. And we only learnt possessive suffixes in 2nd semester.
I'd say that something that helped a lot was that in early 2000s there wasn't that much people speaking English in Budapest. So, no cheating.
But also, trying to speak Hungarian would get people smiling at you for trying. People would say "But Hungarian is the most difficult language in the world!" (maybe not true, but I'd hear that a lot).
After a year and a half, I could communicate with my Mother in law, with some mistakes, but enough to get around and get complimented on my skills.
Couldn't continue living in Budapest, had to return to my home country in Latin America. But later in life, got the opportunity to move to Berlin. I thought "Well, I learnt Hungarian, I can learn German". How wrong I was.
Being able to cheat (Everybody speaks English) and trying to do this in your 30's is much harder.
Not only that, I guess what what made everything just not worthy was Germans giving you shit every time you make a mistake, or your 5-vowel mother language makes it hard to pronounce things. Not only that, but then if you make mistakes you get judged immediately as somebody that "didn't want to integrate". People would generalize and now, after 10 years. With 2 half-german daughters I don't want to learn the language.