Product Description

Colloquial Hungarian contains all the basic grammar of contemporary Hungarian illustrated with modern every-day situations and literary excerpts and a complement of exercises for individual practice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #376778 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-14
• Original language: Hungarian, English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From the Back Cover
Colloquial Hungarian is the ideal introduction to the Hungarian Language.
Specially written by experienced teachers, the course offers a step-by-step approach to written and spoken Hungarian and covers a variety of modern everyday situations.
What makes Colloquial Hungarian your best choice in personal language learning?
* emphasis on up-to-date, conversational language
*comprehensive vocabulary lists (Hungarian-English and English-Hungarian)
*useful reference grammar notes
*Dialogues and cultural notes provide an introduction to Hungarian culture.
By the end of this rewarding course you will be able to communicate confidently and effectively in Hungarian in a braoad range of everyday situations, both formal and informal.
Two 60-minute cassettes or CDs are available to accompany Colloquial Hungarian. Recorded by native Hungarian speakers, these complement the book and will help you develop your pronunciation and listening skills.

About the Author
Carol H Rounds is lecturer in Hungarian and has been teaching at Columbia University since 1988. Previous titles include Hungarian:An Essential Grammar, another in the Routledge language series. Erika S^'olyom is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at New York University. She has received a number of fellowships, including a Fulbright Grant and a Soros Foundation Fellowship.

Customer Reviews

It's a good course. Audio material could be better.
I'm using this course to get familiar with hungarian language before actually coming to Hungary - and as such don't have native speakers around. While book is very good structured, I have enormous difficulties to understand the dialogs on Audio-CD. Each dialog is recorded only once, and even from the beginning on the "full-speed" - as it will be spoken in the real live. I thougth the book is for beginners!
Langenscheidt in their "30 days"-series records first 10 lessons twice - in "slow" version and then the real spoken. I think that is something the publishers of this book should think about.

Good, but not as good as its predecessor
I ahve been learning Hungarian as a challenge for a few years now. I started with the previous Colloquial Hungarian course (by Szuzsa Pontifex?) which was in my opinion a lot more fun, relevant and had much better audio materials - quite fast, but not as fast as the recordings on this newer course. The new course is still probably the best out there, but I don't think it represents any improvement on the previous one!

only half the book is good
Up until chapter 8 the book is actually very good, which is why I don't give it just one star, so half the book is usable.

However, as from chapter 8 it suddenly becomes a completely different book:

- the grammar is dreadfully and lazily explained as they just list a whole bunch of cases, pronoun changes etc. for you to memorize from lists, usually without examples and exercises

- each chapter suddenly wants the learner to memorize around 80 new words, which completely changes the reader's learning pace, as it is significantly slowed down and you have spend weeks on a single 20 page chapter, whereas before you could complete a chapter in one week

It is as if the authors realized they were running out of time and decided to cram as much as possible into the reminding chapters of the book.

I have enough experience with Hungarian to make the claim that, with Hungarian, the crucial part is getting a grip on the grammar - everything else, vocabulary and pronunciation, is simple in comparison.
So when you start with Hungarian it is crucial that you get a book that explains the grammar very clearly and at a decent pace so that you can assimilate it well.

If you have alot of time on your hands and alot of patience, by all means, get Colloquial, it is very thorough in what it covers.
But if you want to learn basic Hungarian in a more reasonable time-frame and avoid frustration, then don't get this book.

A book I can recommend if you want to learn the grammar more clearly, is Hungarian: Basic Course (Hippocrene language studies).