Learn Hungarian online

Not yet. We are preparing or assessing a future Hungarian school. Register your interest and we will contact you when the first trial lessons or courses become available.

We do not yet have a confirmed launch date. Once our first teaching dates are fixed, people on the interest list will hear from us first.

We expect to offer both formats, although the first trial phase may begin with a more limited selection.

Yes, Hungarian is genuinely hard for English speakers, but the difficulty is routinely overstated. The US Foreign Service Institute budgets roughly 1,100 hours of intensive study to reach professional working proficiency, about double what Spanish or French require. The reason is distance, not chaos. Hungarian is Uralic, so almost no vocabulary looks familiar. The grammar is unfamiliar but unusually regular, with few irregular verbs and consistent spelling.

No, and the FSI data that these listicles cite actually says the opposite. FSI puts Hungarian at 1,100 hours, in its second-hardest band. Five languages sit above it at 2,200 hours: Arabic, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean, which take literally twice as long. The confusion is numbering. Older five-tier lists label Hungarian Category IV, while the current State Department chart uses four tiers and reserves Category IV for that super-hard group.

The Foreign Service Institute allows about 1,100 hours, or 44 weeks full-time, to reach professional working proficiency. At an hour a day that is several years. But that figure is for working-level fluency, not survival Hungarian, and FSI publishes no A1 equivalent. Greetings, introductions and ordering food arrive far sooner, and most learners manage simple everyday exchanges long before approaching that total.

There is no settled answer, and any source stating one number confidently is skipping a real linguistic debate. Textbooks and Wikipedia usually say 18. Kenesei, Vago and Fenyvesi (1998) count between 17 and 27, depending on whether marginal or unproductive suffixes qualify. Andrew Spencer has questioned whether case is even the right framework, arguing Hungarian’s markers behave like fused postpositions. The count is definitional, not factual.

Because it is not Indo-European. Hungarian belongs to the Uralic family, so it is unrelated to German, to the Slavic languages, and to Romanian, all of which surround it. Its nearest relatives, Finnish and Estonian, separated thousands of years ago and are no longer mutually recognisable. Centuries of contact still left heavy borrowing: roughly 20% of its vocabulary is Slavic, 11% German and 9.5% Turkic. It is not related to Turkish.

Because Hungarian is agglutinative: it stacks suffixes onto a single word where English uses separate words. In London becomes Londonban, with the suffix -ban doing the preposition’s job. Vowel harmony then reshapes each suffix to match the root’s vowels, giving -ban after back vowels (házban) but -ben after front ones (kertben). The long words are therefore predictable rather than random, and once you can segment them they are far easier than they look.

The sounds take practice, but spelling is the easiest part of Hungarian. The alphabet runs to 44 letters: 30 consonants and 14 vowels forming seven short and long pairs (a/á, e/é, i/í, o/ó, ö/ő, u/ú, ü/ű). Spelling is essentially phonetic with no silent letters, so once you know the letters you can pronounce almost any written word you meet. The genuinely hard part is vowel length, which changes meaning.

It depends entirely on what you want from Hungary. English works well in central Budapest among younger people and in tourism, so you can visit comfortably without a word of Hungarian. Outside that bubble it thins out fast: local markets, smaller towns, older people, landlords, doctors and official paperwork. With around 13 million speakers, Hungarian will not travel far beyond Hungary, so the honest case rests on living there, ancestry, or real curiosity.

Start with the alphabet and pronunciation, then build a base of high-frequency words before worrying about grammar. Because Hungarian shares almost no cognates with English, vocabulary is the real bottleneck, and short daily reviews beat long weekly sessions. Free vocabulary trainers, podcasts and Hungarian radio all help train your ear early. Our Hungarian vocabulary trainer is free to use and covers exactly that first step.