Surprising facts about foreign language learning in Hungary

More and more Hungarians speak foreign languages each year. However, despite the amount that has been spent on language education in the past 20-25 years, our results are still very weak, abcug.hu reports. 

Compared to other European countries, the number of foreign language classes in Hungarian public education is one of the highest. Hungarian students have almost twice as many language classes as Danish, Finnish, or Austrian students, and Hungarian students are sorted into classes based on skill level, a method which hardly exists anywhere else. However these advantageous circumstances are not reflected in the language skills of Hungarians. Language teaching is not efficient enough in public education, while higher education offers rarely any opportunities for language learning. Hungarians still equate language exam certificates with language skills, even though these two are often completely unrelated.

Still only very few people speak foreign languages, and those who don’t speak well enough, says Marianne Nikolov, a university professor and researcher who has studied language acquisition and its results in public education for decades.

One of the main reasons for this lies in the methods used in public education. Once the initial excitement of students wears down, the playful, interactive tasks are replaced by uninteresting and monotonous teaching methods which easily discourage children.

Despite the focus on communicative language teaching, teachers soon return to the same methods they themselves were exposed to when they were students.

Children hardly speak in class at all, they read from the text book, do translations, and grammar exercises, says Marianne Nikolov.

A previous study revealed that one third of the language teachers still speaks in Hungarian most of the time, while they also use frontal, teacher-centred instruction methods. Furthermore, the students have to memorise words out of context, and most teachers immediately correct students’ mistakes and have them repeat the correct answer.

The latter is the reason why most Hungarians think that it’s not even worth attempting to speak in a foreign language unless it’s perfect, since teachers give the impression that making mistakes is something that needs to be corrected immediately. According to Marianne Nikolov, these old methods should be replaced by watching videos and films, having conversations, and doing role-plays.