The past few weeks have been very productive, and successful in terms of my learning of the Hungarian language. My community partner and I were able to stay on track with our meetings even though our schedules are very tight this semester. We still meet twice a week to go over some grammar stuff, new vocabulary, exercises from both of the books, and sometimes we also meet for the third time, during the weekend when we devote the whole class to impromptu conversations, drills, and small dialogues. I try to complete the weekly assigned tasks and exercises from the book on my own, in my own free time because I believe that it is much more useful to go over the harder topics during the actual meeting time with my community partner. So far we have covered the following topics:
-word order in negative sentences and questions;
-various articles and their usage within the sentence;
-adverbs of time and place;
-irregular verbs;
-plural forms;
-ordinal numbers;
-verbs ending with -s, -sz, -z;
-plural forms of adjectives;
-new vocabulary from the modules such as ‘in the office’, ‘human qualities’, ‘city’, ‘means of transport’, ‘greetings’, ‘restaurant’, ‘food’, ‘shopping’, ‘colors’, ‘hobbies’, ‘jobs and professions’.
This is not to complete the list of topics and the things we have done because each section of the book also includes the review of the previous chapters and concepts. However, these are the main things we have been focusing on.
A couple of weeks ago I was a little frustrated with my process of learning Hungarian. I have this notebook where I write all the new words by sections - verbs, adjectives, and nouns. When I looked at these words, I was confident that I knew and remembered them. However, every single time I had to make up sentences and use them in speech, they just vanished and I could not remember them anymore. My community partner, who is also one of my friends right now, was always trying to calm me down and help me out. Day by day, class by class I became more confident in myself and the idea of me coming up with sentences even though their grammar structure or the pronunciation were not necessarily completely right. At some point I just let myself speak, and used any new vocabulary I remembered at that point from the particular unit/topic. In the meantime, I developed a habit of coming up with the Hungarian word for almost every single object I was holding in my hands. For example, during class when I have a pen in my hand, I tell myself ‘toll’ (‘pen’ in Hungarian). Also, I believe watching short youtube videos and kids cartoons helps me a lot during my learning process.
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