Good news: the Hungarian alphabet is very similar to English and many of the sounds are the same as English sounds. Bad news: some of the sounds are only slightly different so that you think you are saying a word correctly when you are not. Often, the hardest words to pronounce are the words that are similar enough to English that you only think you are saying them correctly, but you aren’t.

In contrast to English, Hungarian letter pronunciation is pretty consistent. The exceptions are few, logical and rather easily learned. You pronounce every letter. When you have a double consonant, you hold the sound twice as long, even if it is a “t” or a “d”. Go figure. Consonants like t, p and k are pronounced differently from English, but they are close enough that Hungarians will generally understand you, even if you say them incorrectly.

Long vowels are actually long. If the vowel has an accent mark over it, you hold it twice as long as if it does not. (What we would see as accent marks are really not accents.  Hungarian stresses the first sylable of every word.) With the exception of e and a, the sound itself does not change, just how long you hold the sound. To illustrate: uj (with a long u and a short j) means “new”; ujj (with a short u and a long j) means “finger”.

A few of the consonant sounds are hard to pronounce, as are some of the vowel sounds. Two vowel sounds are totally different from English, u with two dots or two accent marks over it, and o with two dots or two accent marks over it. To give you an idea of what these two vowels sound are like, form your lips as if you were about to say “oo” in boot and then say “ee” as in feet. That would be the double dotted “u.” Not pronouncing these vowel sounds correctly can be embarrassing. When you sing, “Great is Thy faithfulness” in Hungarian with English vowel pronunciation, it comes out something like, “You burn meat infinitely.”

One other feature of Hungarian, Turkish, Finnish and a few other languages is vowel harmony. Vowel harmony means that the vowels in the suffix have to agree with the vowels in the root word. The language divides vowels into three categories: vowels pronounced in the back of the mouth, (u, o, a), vowels pronounced in the front of the mouth with the lips rounded (u and o with the double dots or double accent marks), and vowels pronounced in the front of the mouth with the lips unrounded (i, e). Most endings have two forms (front or back) and some have three. The choice is instictive for the native speaker, but the non-native speaker has to choose both the correct ending and the correct vowels for the ending depending on the vowels in the root word.