“Tanulok Beszélni”
Mikyla Carpenter
When I first arrived in Hungary, I landed at the Budapest Liszt Ferenc Nemzetközi Repülőtér. I saw buses pulling away from a buszmegálló, and later I took the metro from Kodály körönd to Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út. The first thing I will need to learn, I realized immediately, is how to read. Conveniently, the short language course that preceded our study abroad program’s semester of mathematics began with pronunciation. I learned that cs sounds like “ch” and that c sounds like “ts.” I learned the differences between ö, ő, a and á, e and é. I started muttering to myself everywhere I went, trying to learn how to articulate these strange sound combinations.
My incessant practicing helped me gain confidence, and I was able to read more quickly and to try tackling the longer words. Because the Hungarian language depends on word extenders like prefixes and suffixes to modify meaning, words can get long very easily—for example, legeslegtöredezettségmentesíthetetlenebbeskedéseitekért is a grammatically acceptable Hungarian word meaning something like “because of your highest unfragmentationability factor.” That one is a hair long for me, but I eventually developed enough verbal agility to get myself around town and ask for strange foods. I got in such a habit of reading the letter “s” like “sh” and carefully enunciating every vowel that it has affected how I pronounced words in other languages. On a weekend trip to Paris during the semester, as I scanned the metro map, “Rennes” was automatically interpreted by my brain as “Rennesh.” The tendency even has spread to the occasional English word or name, and it took me a few weeks after returning to the US to train myself out of reading a phrase like “Silas, from Mesa, Arizona” as “Sheelosh, from Mesha, Arizona.”
On the other hand, I never really got the hang of the “gy” sound. It was sort of like the soft sound of “j,” sort of like the “d” sound in “education” or “undulation,” sort of like “gee, why is this so hard to pronounce?” We spend about ten minutes in one of our early language classes just repeating this sound, trying to get it right. Our teacher walked around correcting us cheerfully, but we really didn’t have much hope.
“Gee. Djee? Gy-gYUH – no, fuck – gyih? Shit goddamn…” It was a bonding experience.
Trying to speak Hungarian with natives was an adventure. Hungarians aren’t particularly used to tourists. Our language teacher told us that it was only after the Cold War era that visits from foreigners became more frequent, which is why natives don’t quite know how to react when someone butchers their language. But there I was, studying in a nation far from home, and I decided it wouldn’t be fair to walk around a foreign country making everyone speak whatever language was most convenient for me. When I did attempt to speak Hungarian (most often when I was ordering food), the response was very frequently open laughter, amusement, and “You can speak English, it’s okay.” Awkward.
But then occasionally I would encounter a native Hungarian who didn’t speak English at all. If I wanted to know what was inside that pastry, for instance, I had to stitch together the smatterings of grammatical phrases that I knew and hope it was comprehensible while the poor listener squinted and cocked their head at me as politely as they could. When I had the confidence to walk into a store and have a brief but complete interaction entirely in Hungarian, I felt so successful. Not knowing the language tended to keep me quiet, but I learned to put myself out there. Over time, I learned to talk. And it felt good to be heard.
There are a few particular phrases that are good to know how to say in the local language. For example, “good day,” “do you speak English,” “where is the bathroom,” “one scoop of chocolate ice cream please,” and “excuse me” all came in handy. “Thank you” was one of my favorite stock phrases because the full, formal way to say it, köszönöm szépen, literally means “thank you beautifully,” and I just loved that. One of my classmates said this to our waitress (in his terrible American accent) with a strangely theatrical sincerity, and she laughed aloud in delight. And when I bought a slice of cake at a pastry shop and the kindly old woman behind the counter smiled at me and thanked me beautifully, I left the store on soft feathers.
In a presentation given to us by the people running our program, we learned that Hungarians have sort of a negative view of themselves, in a nationalistic sense, and perhaps something of a martyr complex after centuries of being a tug of war rope yanked around by more powerful countries. World War II battered Hungary, as did the terrible leadership they dealt with during the spread of communism. Many of their holidays involve honoring those who were killed in this or the other invasion of their country. When polled, the majority of Hungarians expressed the belief that, if Hungary suddenly vanished from the Earth, the rest of the world a) wouldn’t notice, and b) wouldn’t care.
The idea that the rest of the world wouldn’t care makes me sad, and I dearly hope it is inaccurate. Aside from the countless lovely individuals who live there, with their magnificent mustaches and emphatic friendliness, apart from the country’s succulent sour cherry pastries, the artwork that is its architecture, and all manner of other things, I believe the Hungarian language has value. I know I would miss it if it were to suddenly vanish. It is structurally unlike any other language in the area, but, like every language, its idiosyncrasies reveal aspects of the country’s history, culture, and values. For example, the Hungarians have two categories for vowel sounds that depend on things like mouth shape. Regardless of how many prefixes and suffixes are tacked on to a root, each entire word must only contain vowels from a single category. This gives the language a unique harmonious quality. I found the language beautiful, and part of me has now claimed it as my own.
One day in our language class we were learning adjectives, and our teacher asked us if there were any other particular ones we wanted to know. My classmates had some reasonable inquiries.
“How do you say warm, rather than hot?”
“Meleg.”
“How do you say nice, like a nice person?”
“Kedves.”
“What’s the Hungarian word for fun?”
Slight pause.
Our teacher told us, “There is no word.”
“What? You don’t have a word for fun?” “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard…” As the initial shock of confusion faded we began to laugh uproariously. Our teacher knew exactly how dismal it sounded and laughed along with us, and I think she was amused by our amusement. My own tenderness for this fantastic, strange, quirky language deepened.
Another unusual Hungarian-ism we learned about involves the exciting social situation of getting someone you like to come home with you. Apparently if you ask someone, “Wanna come over and see my… stamp collection?” everyone will know what you really mean. We developed and extensively applied an “eyebrow waggle” technique as we practiced saying this phrase. I don’t know if any of my classmates encountered this in use during their stay in Budapest, but if they did then they would at least have been informed.
One of the more intriguing words I learned was sörözik, pronounced (roughly) “shererzeek.” It is a verb meaning “to beer,” differentiated from the idea of “to drink beer” by the, shall we say, intensity of the activity. It is constructed from the noun “sör” (beer) and the verb modifier “-ozik.”
Similarly, strandozik means “to beach,” something I gladly put into practice when a large group of us took a trip to Lake Balaton, Hungary’s largest and most famous lake. When we arrived, it was beautiful and sunny, and we were pulled toward the shoreline by the icy blue surface. The water thoughtfully stayed at roughly neck height for tens of meters as visitors waded and swam and splashed and stood when they got tired. We paused by the water and looked around at each other silently for a few moments.
“Shall we strandozik?”
“Oh yes, let’s.”
Tanulok beszélni. I am learning to talk.
