The Hungarian Alphabet (A magyar ábécé)
The most important thing to learn as a beginner is the alphabet of the language you'd like to acquire. The Hungarian alphabet might look a bit "scary" at first because it contains more letters than most Romance languages, but once you learn it, you'll be able to pronounce almost any Hungarian word. In another blog post I've already talked about the so called IPA characters and the Hungarian pronunciation guide. I highly recommend checking it out as well.
The Hungarian alphabet (a magyar ábécé) is based on the Latin alphabet but some letters have different variations (for example the Latin "o" is the base of many Hungarian vowels: o, ó, ö, ő). There are 44 letters, but some of them can only be found in foreign words and traditional Hungarian family names (q, w, x, y), so you won't come across them very often. Let's take a look at all the lowercase and capital letters:
The Hungarian alphabet
a, á, b, c, cs, d, dz, dzs, e, é, f, g, gy, h, i, í, j, k, l, ly, m, n, ny, o, ó, ö, ő, p, q, r, s, sz, t, ty, u, ú, ü, ű, v, w, x, y, z, zs
A, Á, B, C, Cs, D, Dz, Dzs, E, É, F, G, Gy, H, I, Í, J, K, L, Ly, M, N, Ny, O, Ó, Ö, Ő, P, Q, R, S, Sz, T, Ty, U, Ú, Ü, Ű, V, W, X, Y, Z, Zs
Now it's time to learn them! In this video I teach you how to pronounce every single Hungarian letter. Watch it a few times and memorize the ones you find difficult.
I assume you already speak English very well (even if it's not your mother tongue) because you are reading this article. That's why I suggest you read my Hungarian pronunciation guide as well, where I use a lot of English words to show you how to pronounce these Hungarian letters.
Handwriting:
I'd like to talk about the acute accent (á, é, í, ó, ú) and the double acute accent (ő, ű). All of them are written with one or two straight, vertical lines. If you take a look at the text on this website or in your study books, you can see that most fonts don't follow this rule and it can be confusing because it is different in every language (i.e.: é, è). So you might wonder one day about the position of the acute accents when it comes to handwriting. Well, now you know, it is just a simple, vertical line.
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