Want to sound more like a native Hungarian? Here are some tips!

While it is never easy to start learning a new language, Hungarian is considered one of the most difficult languages. For example, foreigners usually find pronunciation the most challenging. However, with a few tips, you can even sound like a native Hungarian!

Hungarian is an agglutinating language

Something that makes the Hungarian language unique is agglutination, writes catchbudapest.com. As the word suggests, agglutination means the process of sticking prefixes and suffixes to the beginnings and endings of the words. English, however, is an analytic language, which uses helper words to give extra meaning to words such as time or place. If you really want to sound like a native Hungarian, you should look out for its agglutinating nature. For example, instead of saying in our house, Hungarians say it with one word, házunkban.

The ‘gy’ sound

Sound such as gy are very tricky and foreigners usually do not know how to pronuance these correctly. Although in English, people would say that g and y are two different letters, in Hungarian, it is one. It might help that the Hungarian gy sounds the same a soft j sound in English. Therefore, you might pronounce the word magyar as moh-jar.

• Read also: Check out these strange Hungarian superstitions!

‘s’ or ‘sz’

Again, if we compare the Hungarian language with the English, we can spot a difference in the s sound, too. While in English, s is pronounced in different ways, the Hungarian has two different letters for the two different pronunciations. The Hungarian s is actually a sh sound and it appears in words like Budapest. Meanwhile, you may pronounce the sz sound as ess, such as in the word szia meaning hello.