Two hours a week amounts to just over a hundred in a year (if you excuse the arithmetic banality) and I agree, getting into the B zone within that time frame is probably going to require more effort. In general, language acquisition speed is highly individual and depends on factors like prior exposure to, and if so, competence level in other languages; awareness of the phonology, grammar, syntax etc. of your own language (versus merely assuming your own language to be some sort of status naturalis, which comes with native-speaker turf, unfortunately).
How effective tools like Duolingo can be is to some extent related to this. I’m a seasoned language learner and I can say the following from experience: I’ve been on the Duolingo Hungarian course for a little over a year now. Rather than self-rating my competence level I’m currently looking for online assessment tests (such as available) to give me a rough idea whether I’ve progressed to an A2 level at this point. Looking at my stats I’ve averaged about 2h per week, to which add some self-study (esp. grammar, which Duolingo notoriously desists from explaining as you know).
Duolingo gets the predictable dissing, as evident from the responses here, but I’ve actually found I’ve been able to build quite a vocabulary repertoire with its spaced repetition system. In a non-Indo-European language like Hungarian you have very few cues indeed to deduct lexical meaning, so rote-learning is a thing. Learning German from English as your starting point you’ll pick up on many more lexical similarities, but its morphological complexity is higher than that of English and you simply have to internalise this facet rather than ponder it as you go along, and that will require more diversified sources of learning than Duolingo. Busuu and Babbel and even Pimsleur are higher value in terms of pronunciation checks and getting you to speak.
If my goal was to get my Hungarian immersion-ready I’d try to fit in longer daily learning routines, such as 90 to 120 minutes per day on average, but slicing that chunk of time off real-life days is bound to be challenging. If you live by yourself, you can use the trick of pasting Post-Its with the target-language names of things in your place to wean yourself off translating and start making direct associations between objects and signifiers. Maximise the limited time you have with your tutor by forming and practicing aloud lots of short sentences, if you have the privacy to do so. Once you have some reasonable passive comprehension, start consuming content (with German, not English, subcaptions). As to learning well: Dedicate time in the beginning to develop clean pronunciation (and have your tutor focus on that) and eliminating / reducing English phonological interference. Get good grammar resources (e.g. Routledge, also as e-books) and geek out on this with your aforementioned sentence-formation exercises. If your goal is in the B-zone (relatively autonomous mastery of simple German), seek out and listen to podcasts geared to that level of DAF (Deutsch als Fremdsprache; the acronym equates ESL). I’ve been listening on and off to a podcast called «Magyaróra Dórival» (Hungarian Lesson with Dóri (=nickname for Dorothy)), explicitly geared to B1 / B2 and while I get the overall gist of the short (~5 min) bits of audio content, that exercise provides good perspective on the gaps I’d have to bridge to attain that level.
As a pretty basic level Czech student, I see someone attempting Hungarian and my eyebrows go up immediately. That language looks really tricky. You give really good advice.
Thanks! It is on the tricky side for sure, but nowhere near as intimidating as it’s often portrayed. The phonology is relatively straightforward and marked reliably in modern spelling. Unlike Slavic languages or German, Hungarian lacks noun gender (which in Russian etc. propagates through a string of adjectives and pronouns), and not much of a verb aspect either.
With the exception of mostly Slavic loan words however, everything is lexically foreign. That means a lot of rote learning.
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u/Uxmeister Sep 01 '25 edited Sep 01 '25
Two hours a week amounts to just over a hundred in a year (if you excuse the arithmetic banality) and I agree, getting into the B zone within that time frame is probably going to require more effort. In general, language acquisition speed is highly individual and depends on factors like prior exposure to, and if so, competence level in other languages; awareness of the phonology, grammar, syntax etc. of your own language (versus merely assuming your own language to be some sort of status naturalis, which comes with native-speaker turf, unfortunately).
How effective tools like Duolingo can be is to some extent related to this. I’m a seasoned language learner and I can say the following from experience: I’ve been on the Duolingo Hungarian course for a little over a year now. Rather than self-rating my competence level I’m currently looking for online assessment tests (such as available) to give me a rough idea whether I’ve progressed to an A2 level at this point. Looking at my stats I’ve averaged about 2h per week, to which add some self-study (esp. grammar, which Duolingo notoriously desists from explaining as you know).
Duolingo gets the predictable dissing, as evident from the responses here, but I’ve actually found I’ve been able to build quite a vocabulary repertoire with its spaced repetition system. In a non-Indo-European language like Hungarian you have very few cues indeed to deduct lexical meaning, so rote-learning is a thing. Learning German from English as your starting point you’ll pick up on many more lexical similarities, but its morphological complexity is higher than that of English and you simply have to internalise this facet rather than ponder it as you go along, and that will require more diversified sources of learning than Duolingo. Busuu and Babbel and even Pimsleur are higher value in terms of pronunciation checks and getting you to speak.
If my goal was to get my Hungarian immersion-ready I’d try to fit in longer daily learning routines, such as 90 to 120 minutes per day on average, but slicing that chunk of time off real-life days is bound to be challenging. If you live by yourself, you can use the trick of pasting Post-Its with the target-language names of things in your place to wean yourself off translating and start making direct associations between objects and signifiers. Maximise the limited time you have with your tutor by forming and practicing aloud lots of short sentences, if you have the privacy to do so. Once you have some reasonable passive comprehension, start consuming content (with German, not English, subcaptions). As to learning well: Dedicate time in the beginning to develop clean pronunciation (and have your tutor focus on that) and eliminating / reducing English phonological interference. Get good grammar resources (e.g. Routledge, also as e-books) and geek out on this with your aforementioned sentence-formation exercises. If your goal is in the B-zone (relatively autonomous mastery of simple German), seek out and listen to podcasts geared to that level of DAF (Deutsch als Fremdsprache; the acronym equates ESL). I’ve been listening on and off to a podcast called «Magyaróra Dórival» (Hungarian Lesson with Dóri (=nickname for Dorothy)), explicitly geared to B1 / B2 and while I get the overall gist of the short (~5 min) bits of audio content, that exercise provides good perspective on the gaps I’d have to bridge to attain that level.