Let us get this straight: The Hungarian alphabet is EASY!

 

It’s way easier than the English one and also a lot more useful. You read this right. Yes, it has 40 letters (to be perfectly correct it’s 44, but we don’t really ever use “Q”, “W”, “X” and “Y”. Only in foreign words. You’ll know how to spell those.) and yes, Hungarian words look weird at first. But while the English alphabet prides itself on having only 26 letters, learning these won’t actually get you anywhere.

 

Why? Because English is not a phonetic language. English words are not pronounced according to the alphabet. Take the word “juice” as an example. Having learned the English alphabet and having no other knowledge of the language, you would probably pronounce “juice” as something, like “j-you-i-cee”, since you’ve learned that a u is a “you”, an i is an “I” and an e is an “ee”. 26 letters just aren’t enough to express the complex pronunciation system of the English language and even after years of studying and speaking the language fluently you probably find yourself guessing how to say words like “gouge” or “gauge” correctly and asking why “heart”, “beard” and “heard” are each pronounced differently.

 

As you might’ve guessed by now, the case is different with Hungarian. Its 40 letters are not a curse but a blessing and having learned these letters will enable you to pronounce each and every single Hungarian word. Correctly. Without second-guessing. These 40 letters are just the right amount of letters you need to actually represent a pronunciation system. You will need about an hour to remember all of them, which is not that much for what you get in return.

 

So bear with us and let’s master this weird-looking maze of letters and apostrophes together – here are our 4 easy steps to learning the Hungarian alphabet.

 

1. Start with the weirdest Stuff of the Hungarian Alphabet

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You have all our sympathy if a word like “karácsony” freaks you out (don’t worry, it only means Christmas though…). A c behind an s is weird and so is the y behind the n. Well, these are actually the so-called ”digraphs”, but since I’m not a linguist, I just call them double-letters. The idea behind them is to express one single sound with two or three letters from the latin alphabet. This means, that c+s are actually one letter with only one possible sound. So are n+y. There are eight such double-letters and one triple-letter in the Hungarian alphabet:

 

 CS – pronounced as the “ch” in “check” or cheek”

DZ – pronounced as the “ds” in “kids”

 DZS (the only triple letter) – pronounced as the “j” in “jam”

 GY – pronounced as the “d” in “during”

LY – pronounced as the “y” in “yes”

NY – pronounced as the “n” in “new”

SZ – pronounced as the “s” in “sister”

TY – pronounced as the “t” in “tube”

ZS – pronounced as the “s” in “pleasure”

 

That’s it. Learn these letter-combos and remember that they always, always represent the same single sound. Congratulations. You’ve conquered the hardest part of the Hungarian alphabet. “Karácsony” shouldn’t really freak you out anymore. Well, except for maybe the “á”, which takes us to the second step of…

 

2. Get acquainted with the Apostrophes

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These weirdo little strokes are admittedly unfamiliar for the English speaker, but they are totally harmless. Their one single function is to lengthen the vocals in a word. As an example, if you see an “í”, it just means that you have to pronounce it longer, than the “i”. The only exceptions are “á” and “é” – they are spelled a bit differently, than their apostrophless cousins:

 

“A” is pronounced as the “a” in “awe”; while “á” is pronounced as the “a” in “father”:

“E” is pronounced as the “e” in less,; while è” is pronounced as the “é” in “café”

 

For all the rest (í, ó, ő, ű) – just hold the vocal for a bit longer and you’re good (hear pronunciation below).

 

By now, you have conquered everything that freaks people out about the Hungarian alphabet. All that’s left is walk in the park.

 

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3. Learn the Rest of the Hungarian Alphabet

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Now let’s go through the rest one by one and you will see that most of what’s left is similar to what you know from English. I’ve marked those letters which are fundamentally different from what you’d expect with a.

 

“B” is just a normal, everyday-B. Boring. Baby.

“C” – pronounced as the “ts” in “pots”

“D” – is also Damn boring.

“F” – “f” as in “f…”

“G” – pronounced as the “g” in “get”

“H” – pronounced as the “h” in “hi”

“I” (& “Ì”) – pronounced as the “i” in “thin” (the Í is just a bit longer as in “bee”)

“J” – pronounced as the “y” in “yes”

“K”, “L”, “M”, & “N” are, what they are

“O” (& “Ó”) – pronounced as “o” in “force” (the Ó is just a bit longer as in “hole”)

– “Ö” (& “Ő”) – although these letters don’t exist in the English alphabet as such, their soundings definitely do. Think of the “u” in “urban” and “burn”, or the “ea” in early.

“P” is “P”

“R” can be a bit tricky. We roll it on the tips of our tongues, as the Italians do. Like the “r” in “pronto!”. But even if you can’t roll it, people will understand you, so don’t worry.

“S” – pronounced as the “sh” in “share”.

“T”- is “T”.

“U” (& “Ú”) – pronounced as the “u” in bull but NOT as the “u” in “unique”.

“Ü” (& “Ű”) – the only two letters that do not have a real equivalent in English. Here, just rely on your fractional knowledge of French and think of the “tu-tu” of a ballet-dancer.

“V” – pronounced as the “v” in “every”

“Z” – pronounced as the “s” in “desert”.

 

Final Note:

 

Just like in English, we simply double long consonants in writing. If the consonant you want to double is a digraph or the trigraph, you just double the first letter of it.Let’s see a few examples for that:

 

Single Consonants:

Lottó (lottery) – the t gets doubled in the same principle as in English.

Lassú (slow)

 

Double Consonants:

Rossz (bad) – note that instead of doubling the whole “sz”, we just double the “s”.

Könnyű (easy, light-weighted) – same here. We only double the “n”, not the whole “ny”.

 

And that’s it. Now you can read “karácsony”. And “csúnya”. And even “zsibbasztó”. Or ”dzsúsz” (yes – we made this one phonetic, too.) And everything else.

 

4. Practice the Hungarian Alphabet!

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Now let’s see how far we’ve got you. Try to spell the following 15 words out loud and only listen to the pronunciation for reviewing purposes.

 

Víz (water)

 

Kacsa (duck)

 

Tyúk (hen)

 

Asztal (table)

 

Karácsony (christmas)

 

Kacskaringós (curvy)

 

Szűk (narrow)

 

Nyűgös (grumpy)

 

Keskeny (another word for narrow)

 

Kecske (goat)

 

Gyűrű (ring, n)

 

Halandzsa (gibberish)

 

Karambol (collision)

 

Lepény (flat bread)

 

Csütörtök (Thursday)

 

Bonus:

 

Tini Nindzsa Harci Teknőcök (Ninja Turtles in Hungarian)

 

Hupikék Törpikék (The Smurfs in Hungarian)

 

Congratulations! You have now mastered the Hungarian alphabet. But don’t forget though, that the real practice is to just walk through the streets of Budapest and decipher all signs you encounter. Try to read the street names, the names of the cafés and restaurants and see what’s written on the stores.

 

Bonus: Our Cheat Sheet for the Hungarian Alphabet

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Should you get stuck somewhere, fear not: Here is our cheat sheet including all those letters and their pronunciation that you could possibly forget. We’ve created it for you with love and lots of warm colours. You can save it to your phone or print it out and take it anywhere you want. In Budapest and beyond.

 

 

And one last tip at the end: 

If you are desperately looking for the Hungarian characters on your non-Hungarian keyboard, you can use this page instead, to type the missing Hungarian characters.

 

Have fun and don’t forget to tell us about your favourite new word that you can now spell in the comments!

 

More posts about Learning Hungarian:

• 35 Good Reasons You Should Bother Learning Hungarian

• Learn Hungarian Passively: 8 Ways to integrate Hungarian into your Everyday-Life

• Learn the Hungarian Numbers in 9 Easy Steps (with Pronunciation)