Which language is easier to learn? Polish or Hungarian?
Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at
6:22 am
Like what I said. I know Hungarian has a lot of cases but they are all agglutinative whereas Polish changes some of the word in order to figure out the case. Could someone who has tried to learn both please give me a good explanation on which is easier?
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Tagged with: hungarian
Filed under: Polish Language
Polish must be easier, especially if you have some knowledge of another Slavic language. Hungarian is unlike any other language. The Finnish relation is very distant and is not 100% confirmed. Being a Hungarian, I don’t understand a word of Finnish, and it doesn’t sound anything like Hungarian to me.
I speak neither, but I have heard that Hungarian and Finnish are not only very unusual languages within Europe but have similar roots. Based upon that alone, I would say that Polish would be the easier of the two.
Hungarian being very difficult is a myth. “Cases” in Hungarian and the cases of Indo-European languages are not the same thing. Hungarian’s noun suffixes are much more like the prepositions of English, except that they come after the noun. Yes, attaching a suffix does cause the stem to be slightly altered, but the changes are mostly regular and predictable. Furthermore, each ending (suffix) corresponds to one meaning, and each meaning corresponds to a pair of endings (one for back and one for front vowels). Suffixes are separate from each other, and can be stacked. E.g. the plural marker is completely separate from the “case” marker suffix. Also, Hungarian has no gender.
I do not know Polish, but if I compare this situation with other inflected languages I have some experience with, such as Modern Greek, it’s not at all obvious that the large number of suffixes would cause any greater learning difficulty that prepositions do in English. In Greek one ending encodes gender, case, and number, however, unlike in Hungarian, it’s impossible to figure these three properties out from the ending without knowing exactly which of the numerous noun classes the inflected word belongs to. For example, an -os ending could indicate Nominative, masculine singular (Nm/sg), or Nf/sg, or Nn/sg, or Gn/sg. That’s four different noun classes, three of which have completely different ending sets.
Hungarian is very regular compared to that.