Hungarian: An Essential Grammar (Routledge Essential Grammars)

I bought this book years ago to supplement my study of Hungarian. That part hasn't gone perfectly, but I'm still trying, and this book is a godsend when it comes to explaining the grammar. You're not going to learn the language from this book. That's not its goal. But it does describe everything clearly and that is worth a lot.

I am learning Hungarian and taking a weekly online course. The approach is phrase based immersion. However, my brain can’t learn these phrases without knowing how they are structured grammatically. This book has been very helpful. I do have a background in linguistics. Without that, I do think it would be a bit challenging to jump into the text. It assumes knowledge of English grammar.

The best Hungarian book I’ve found. It explains everything very well. It’s a super challlenging language for English speakers

This book is a comprehensive and extremely detailed reference book but is NOT a step-by-step how-to learn Hungarian book. Students must have some Hungarian language skills before approaching this book, which discusses the nuances and of various grammatical structures but does not have anything approaching lessons, chapter readings or exercises. Hungarian language beginners will be completely lost by the second chapter.

Great book for navigating through Hungarian’s difficult Grammar

This grammar reference is very clear and comprehensive. It is not a course to follow, I.e. does not start at a basic level and move to more complex structures. It is organized by parts of speech, and charts the facts. The illustrative sentences give a clear idea of the principles discussed. The main problem is not with the book, but with its subject: the Hungarian language is as good as impossible for the English speaker to really learn. But you can try.

This book is an essential reference for anyone studying Hungarian. It covers grammar with understandable explanations and examples making all elements of the language approachable. The index is sufficiently detailed to be able to find the desired explanation without having to leaf through the book in search of answers.

This is a fine and very complete treatment of the language, from a linguistic or syntactical point of view.

Is this book good for beginners? Yes, it's a great source for getting to know how "essential grammar" works. This book achieves its intents as a grammatical guide from beginner to advanced. Is this book great for learning how to speak Hungarian? No, but that's not what this book should be used as. It's intended to help the reader understand Hungarian grammar and gives you a quick start for pronunciation and pronunciation rules/phonotactics. It's clearly meant to be used alongside other recourses such as classes, tutoring, etc. Positives: - Clearly structured mirroring a standard language learning journey - excellent explanations and interreferencing between chapters for clarity - explanations are short and mostly simple. Technical language is used but can be easily looked up in the appendix or online. - examples are real world examples that are used in actual spoken Hungarian Negatives: - the use of the IPA is for a lack of better words "wack" ny in the IPA is /ɲ/ though this book uses /ŋ/ which makes the nɡ sound as in sinɡ ty in the IPA is /c/ but the Hungarian letter c is /ts/ in the IPA, yet oftentimes phonetic transcriptions will confuse these two so the reader will have to pay attention to this. (See attached photos for reference) All in all very solid and I cannot recommend it enough if you're serious about studying Hungarian grammar. Special comment on interjections (erm, hm, hooray): - small sample of interjections used as Hungarian has a lot of them - American Christians might take offence to "Jezús Mária!" Or "Jaj istenem" (Oh my god) being interjections and spread propaganda that this is anti-Christian sentiment. That is not the case and these are genuine interjections expressing surprise/shock. (See attached photo)

This starts you off with all the basic knowledge of Hungarian and is a must have when learning the language.

I bought this book (together with other, related books) in order to produce a translation of a single medical document (I am a medical translator and doctor). It is much less turgid than many of the grammars I have used for my other 20 languages: and each section of the grammar is studded with excellent examples of usage. There are 17 chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of grammar (for example, the verb conjugations, the case system, pronouns, time expressions, suffixes and sentence structure). Things are explained simply and logically. All that the reader has to do is to assimilate it - a daunting task. For most students I would advise that it be used as a reference book and not be read cover-to-cover. I'm glad I bought it.

Excellent reference book!

As a beginner I don't know if this book is perfect for all Hungarian learning but For the moment it is very clear, explanations and examples are really useful and I do recommend it for students.