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Fun Facts You Didn’t Know About Hungarian Language – 2.

Even though Hungarian people have been here in the heart of Europe for a thousand years, our language cannot be compared to that of any other nearby nation or ethnic group, and it has peculiarities that leave a foreigner scratching their head. Here are some interesting facts about the Hungarian language! 

Hungarian is one of the most difficult languages in the world 

What doesn't even occur to us, causes a serious headache for most foreign-speaking language learners. It is a fact that everyone with their mother tongue has an advantage, but Hungarian is still one of the most unique and difficult languages in the world to learn. 

Its 14 vowels make it very difficult to learn 

While the English language uses a total of 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u), Hungarian can express itself with almost three times as many. Most foreign speakers need a lot of practice to be able to use the different vowels correctly, especially since each also has a longer or accented form. 

It is spoken by only 13 million people worldwide 

There are 9.77 million people in our country (according to 2019 data), but the Hungarian language is not only spoken within our borders. It can be found in many places around the world, although most Hungarian speakers are concentrated in neighbouring countries. Of course, in more distant places, even in the United States, we can run into thousands of Hungarian-speaking people. 

Even our letters can confuse foreign speakers 

Like many European languages, Hungarian also has special-looking letters that can confuse language learners. It is not enough that our alphabet consists of 44 letters, the pronunciation of some of them differs sharply from the way, for example, an English person uses them. And let's not even talk about the difference between "J" and "LY"... 

They like to scare Hungarian students with their longest word... 

Most people are already familiar with it, but when it comes to the interesting things about the Hungarian language, this must not be left out of the list. The longest word in the Hungarian language is none other than the infamous “megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért “, meaning due to your (plural) cannot-be-desecratednessoussings.”. Although it is a perfectly reasonable and regular word, it never appears anywhere (unless the topic is focused on the special characteristics of the Hungarian language). 

...however, longer words could be created with it 

Hungarian is a so-called agglutinating language, which means that different elements (suffixes) can be added to words. These words not only become longer, but also change their meaning. In theory, words of up to 100 letters can be created in Hungarian, but they hardly make any sense anymore. 

Which one is your favourite fun fact about Hungarian language? How is your language learning journey going? Share your favourite sentence in Hungarian language!