Colloquial Hungarian (Colloquial Series)

This book is very helpful. I have been studying Hungarian for 8 months and have used several resources. This book is very thorough in its explanations. It seems to have been written by a English/Hungarian team, so it is authentic, yet also geared towards the native English speakers "mind" or way of thinking.I have used other books written by Hungarians which are also useful, but they assume a bit much in terms of how we as English speakers think! For example, finally, after 8 months, I underst the rule fir when to use the Hungarian "to be " and when not to! It is so simple now that I have read it in this book, but no where else have I found it explained so clearly! The CD is sold separately, and is helpful but not essential. Buying the CD without the book, however, is not very helpful. In other words if you can only get one or the other, get the book.

I had a great difficulty finding a book that would teach me Hungarian. There were very few titles available and they didn't look comprehensive enough. This book looked to me as the most promising one. It was rather expensive, and I had to buy pricey Audio CD separately from the book. But, after reading the book excerpt and user reviews I decided to give it a try; and I haven't made a mistake!The book is very well written, and intense, as it progresses rather quickly. The Audio CD is necessary, especially for getting acquainted with the sound of the language.Just be careful to choose the same edition of the book and Audio CD when buying, as there are different editions available. Even though I chose the same edition of both they were still out of sync occasionally.

I am studying Hungarian and this is written intelligently with relevant dialogues and vocabulary broken out for each unit. Sometimes though it introduces grammar elements perhaps a bit early and doesn't give adequate explanation. I would have given it a 5 star rating, but while it has some exercises with each Unit, there are not enough of them to support mastery of the grammar elements. Hopefully in the next edition this will be corrected, but right now you have to write your own exercises above and beyond what is provided. I am studying with a very good instructor but without an instructor this would be very hard. There are also cultural notes that are very helpful. The dictionary at the back of the book is often missing words that are part of the dialogues, so you will need and English Hungarian and a Hungarian English dictionary to supplement.

-------- my wife is hungarian, so i'm learning hungarian in self-defense. i've used three books in class (at uc berkeley ), one from Pontifex, Solyom's first version, and this one .This has exercises that are really aimed at the material - you don't have to have had a miracle occur in order to be able to do them ! The dictionary is MUCH fuller - in both directions. And, typos and other minor glitches are gone.If i have to point out a flaw, the CD, with the dialogues, becomes too fast, too soon .

Good book to learn Hungarian, however half of the dialogues have no english translation.

I have been trying to learn Hungarian for a while and tried several different methods. This book, with its downloadable app to help with the spoken language is finally doing the trick for me. I make an set of Anki flash cards for the vocabulary and study that as I can. I try to get to the book every few days, do some reading, some speaking, and some exercises.My goodness! By the time I return to Hungary next year, I'm going to be speaking like a native!

This is probably the best book out there for learning Hungarian. The grammar is explained very well, and the vocabulary is very useful and covers the basics that will allow you to have a decent conversation in Hungarian

I had to buy this for a class, and I'm kind of wishing my prof had gone with a different book. This just isn't a very good textbook for learning a language. The grammatical explanations are extremely lacking, especially when explaining concepts not present in English. I know there's an accompanying grammar book, but there isn't even a basic explanation for certain concepts, which you'd think would be included. The dictionary is disappointing; it's more of a pain to use it than to just flip through the book to the dialogue where the word was introduced, if the word was even introduced before. It's a pain to navigate, since sometimes words will be used in exercises, like "aeroplane," and then be included in the dictionary as just "plane," and that is even under "machine" (weird Hungarian thing), with no entry under "aeroplane" to point to where the translation actually is, not even an entry like "aeroplane: see 'machine'." Additionally, the dialogue is really contrived and seems like it's trying to cram in as much vocabulary as possible, which in no way helps in learning, since the dialogue will go from discussing one thing to discussing something else entirely, or it will be about something that just doesn't provide a context that's helpful for language learning, like what someone is getting their family members for Christmas.Honestly, I can't imagine this being very helpful outside of a class. Even in a class, it was kind of obnoxious to use. If you're just learning Hungarian for fun, save your money and use a few free online language learning sites. They're way more intuitive than this textbook.