Customer Reviews (4)

Very good
The CD that came with my copy of this dictionary was scratched from the get-go, and never ran.

Having said that, however, I've had no other complaints with this dictionary. I'd have preferred an English-Magyar and Magyar-English dictionary in one edition, and I did later find copies of such dictionaries, by the same publisher, only much older editions.

But if you are looking for a good dictionary that you can carry around with you, this is most definitely the one. It's about $15 in Hungary, and most Budapest bookstores carry these books. A very good dictionary for the English speaker who is just beginning to learn Hungarian, and even for those a little more advanced. It's very thorough, for a pocket dictionary.

Good Dictionary
The only caveat is that this isn't a reciprocal dictionary (ie-it doesn't offer translations from hungarian to english to complement the english hungarian translations).

the best Magyar dictionaries you can get outside of Hungary...
...probably owing to their being made in Hungary! Seriously, though, if you really want to learn Hungarian then you are wasting your time with anything else but this and its partner (Magyar-Angol ISBN-13: 978-9630583589) I feel bad for the guy who wrote the bad review for this, since he didn't know that it's unidirectional or realize that both books must be purchased, but that's the way all dictionaries are in Hungary.
If you're looking for Hungarian dictionaries, go with this. Whatever you do, DO NOT buy the materials on this language from Hippocrene! I hate to talk negative, but as an American who learned Hungarian I can tell you that they are absolutely useless when it comes to speaking or reading Magyar that people actually use. In those, you won't be able to find a third of the words you hear or read, and please believe that I'm not exaggerating. After some years in Hungary, I've realized that every time I try to use them I'm frustrated to find that the word isn't there and I have to pull out these little Akademiai Kiado dictionaries to find it.
This dictionary itself is very well laid out and easy to search through. Definitions, parts of speech and examples(things ignored inalmost all the other Magyar dictionaries available in the US)all of them are here. Best of all, you'll find useful words and phrases that Hungarians actually USE and UNDERSTAND, one of those necessary little aspects Hippocrene leaves out of every single one of its Hungarian titles.
Bottom line:Buy this and its aforementioned partner if you want anything useful. It may be a pain to pay for both dictionaries, but the extra 15 bucks or so is a whole lot better than the headache any other equivalent on the market will cause you.

It's a UNI-DIRECTIONAL dictionary aimed for Hungarian students wishing to speak English
As far as dictionaries go, this is, I'm sure, great.

HOWEVER, it's hard for me to judge because it's aimed at the Hungarian speaker wishing to speak English.
It's a UNI-DIRECTIONAL dictionary (but is bilingual).You cannot look up Hungarian words and find their English meaning - for that you must buy the other book, Magyar-Angol (ISBN-13: 978-9630583589).

I wish I had known about needing to buy the other book.I assumed that it would be bi-directional, as I have NEVER before seen a one-way dictionary.


It comes with a CD for a software dictionary, but:
a) the dictionary, like the book is uni-directional
b) the software in written in Hungarian which as a beginner I do not understand
c) The software mentioned something about 14 days.A 2-week free trial?I must register within 2 weeks?Who knows! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Nice little hardback
Mine is the 607-page, cloth-bound 1982 edition of this volume, which was the 13th printing of it. I gather that there have been several more editions since. This book is much more sturdy than the paperbacks that are sold from earlier years, and unlike later editions, the cover is cloth, not laminated cardboard. The contents, of course, are reliable, though it is quite difficult to carry on a conversation from a dictionary if one does not speak Magyar, it is possible, I have discovered, and this little book helps. ... Read more

Product Description
Translated by R. Nisbet Bain; Hungarian Edition ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Surprisingly astute
I am new to Jokai, and to Hungarian literature in general, so I read this book with no expectations.It was a pleasant surprise: funny in parts, tragic in parts, well-written throughout.It starts with many disparate little stories, which are gradually woven together to form the main narrative.Jokai is very deft at picturing the time and place, i.e., the culture and norms of early 19th century Hungary; it's like a little window into another world (and a strange world it is).Further, he does it with a jaundiced and observant eye, accurately and vividly depicting characters from all walks of life, while skewering their mores and customs.His description of two ladies going over a prospective guest list, with the more experienced woman giving vignettes of each guest to the younger, was hilarious, almost Jane Austen-esque in its sly social commentary.

Unlike Austen, Jokai was unabashedly romantic.There are affronts to honor, duels, dashing officers, thundering steeds, and pathos a-plenty.LOTS of pathos - if you like a good cry, this book will do it for you.I would have knocked off a half star for it but didn't have the heart.

I have since read several other Jokai books (whatever I could find online), and this seems to be one of his best.Well worth the purchase price, a true classic. ... Read more

Product Description
Bestselling language courses now with audio CDs !

From Catonese to Thai, Gaelic to Modern Persian, learning the languages of the world is attainable for any beginning student. Learners can use the Teach Yourself Language Courses at their own pace or as a supplement to formal courses. These complete courses are based on thievery latest learning methods and designed to be enjoyable and user-friendly.

Prepared by experts in the language, each course begins with the basics and gradually promotes the student to a level of smooth and confident communication, including:

• Up-to-date, graded interactive dialogues
• Graded units of culture notes, grammar, and exercises
• Step-by-step guide to pronunciation
• Practical vocabulary
• Regular and irregular verb tables
• Plenty of practice exercises and answers
• Bilingual glossary

The new editions also feature:

• Clear, uncluttered, and user-friendly layout
• Self-assessment quizzes to test progress
• Website suggestions to take language study further

Customer Reviews (3)

teach yourself hungarian
This is an excellent book if you want a true knowledge of the language as it is spoken in Budapest. I use the book in conjunction with a tutor, and it is great. There are practices at the end of each chapter to help one wrap up their knowledge. The book moved me quickly through a difficult language (actually as quickly as I wanted to get through...not always quickly) where I feel confident speaking the language one year later. Like anything worthwhile a new language requires patience and commitment. This is the perfect book for those serious about learning hungarian. My next project is german!
Buy it!!

Misinformation
It didn't come with a CD like it had advertised. Now I gotta find a CD by itself now

Did not recieve recording part of book
When I ordered this book I was under the impression it came with some sort of recording either cassette or cd as an accompanyment to the book. In the first section of the book, labeled introduction on page 4; it says there is an accompanying recording.I specifically ordered this for the inclusion of the recording.So I am not satisfied with this transaction.Whether it is purposefully deceptive or it was an error.I am missing what I think is an important part of this order.

Katalin Pecora ... Read more

Product Description
With english phonetic pronunciation, (third revised edition by Ilona De Gyory Ginever, 18.5 x 12 5 x .o.9 cm) ... Read more

Product Description
From ordering gulyás (goulash) to asking for directions to the Danube River, learn basic Hungarian words and phrases easily and quickly. This popular series helps ensure a more enjoyable, successful, and rewarding trip. Practice pronunciation and listening comprehension before you leave, then take the book along for an optimal travel experience. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

I agree with "A reader from Holland MI"
This is a useful book and cassette. The lessons on the tape are helpful for commonly used phrases in Hungarian. Appears to be the best tape for beginners.

Berlitz Hungarian (Audio Tape and Phrase Book)
I found "Berlitz Hungarian" to be the best introduction to the Hungarian language of several audio casette courses that I tried.It consists of a series of English vocabulary words, each followed first byits Hungarian equivalent, then by a short sentence using that word, firstin English and then in Hungarian.The cassette covers vocabulary andphrases needed for a series of real-life situations, such as purchasingtickets, shopping, reserving a room in a hotel, etc.

This single Berlitzaudio cassette is less comprehensive than the similar two-tape series fromLanguage/30, which I also found very useful, but the Berlitz cassette iseasier to start with.Each Hungarian sentence is read through slowly andclearly and then repeated at normal speed after a short pause.That givesyou an opportunity to test yourself and make corrections before moving onto the next vocabulary word and sentence.Several bodies of material arefollowed by brief dialogues.The dialogue is read through in two voicesand then repeated with just one person's voice alternating with shortsilences for you take the part of the other dialog partner using the wordsand phrases you have just learned.

I found that I could easily use thiscassette while commuting and on the easier stretches of long trips.Afterworking my way (and frequently rewinding) through it three times, I felt Iknew most of the material and could move on to a more advanced course.TheBerlitz audio cassette only explains a few points of grammar.Other pointsof grammar gradually become clear from usage as you go along, but the finerpoints would require a more advanced level of instruction.This is only a"getting to know you" kind of introduction. ... Read more

Product Description
The Malay language, one of the most widely used in Southeast Asia, is commonly assumed to be relatively young. In the course of its development it incorporated a great number of loan words, galvanising them into an organic unit so successfully that it became the chief linguistic vehicle of regional trade. Easy to use and understand, Malay soon functioned as a kind of merchants' Esperanto across the vast archipelago.With this groundbreaking piece of research, Dr György Busztin postulates that the roots of Malay extend much deeper in time than previously thought. This study uncovers over one hundred words that tie the precursor of the Malay language - as we know it today - to languages spoken three thousand years ago on the steppes of Central Asia and its puzzling similarities to the Hungarian (Magyar) language. The Legacy of the Barang People is a must-read work for anyone interested in linguistics and the history of two unlikely cultural relatives.György Busztin, a career diplomat, has spent over a decade in Indonesia, beginning as a grade school student and most recently as the Ambassador of Hungary. With an academic background in linguistics, Dr. Busztin has held positions in both Europe and the Middle East and is fluent in five languages. The Legacy of the Barang People is his first book. ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Hungarian Language, Serbo-Croatian Language, Istro-Romanian Language, Venetian Language, Italian Language in Croatia, Pannonian Rusyn Language, Istriot Language, Bunjevac Speech, Šokac Language. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 120. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Hungarian (magyar nyelv ·)) is a Uralic language, more specifically a Finno-Ugric language distantly related to Finnish, Estonian and a number of other minority languages spoken in the Baltic states and northern European Russia eastward into central Siberia. Finno-Ugric languages are not related to the Indo-european languages that dominate Europe but have acquired loan words from them. Hungarian is mainly spoken in Hungary and by the Hungarian communities in the seven neighbouring countries. The Hungarian name for the language is magyar (Hungarian pronunciation: ), which is also occasionally used as an English noun, such as Mighty Magyars. There are about 14.5 million native speakers, of whom 9.510 million live in present-day Hungary. About 2.5 million speakers live outside present-day Hungary, but in areas that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon (1920). Of these, the largest group lives in Transylvania, the western half of present-day Romania, where there are approximately 1.4 million Hungarians. There are large, majority Hungarian territories also in Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine, but Hungarian speakers can also be found in Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia, as well as about a million people scattered in other parts of the world, for example there are more than a hundred thousand Hungarian speakers in the Hungarian American community in the United States. Hungarian is a Uralic language, more specifically a Ugric language; the most closely related languages are Mansi and Khanty of west...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=13972 ... Read more

Product Description
19 000 headwords5000 expressions ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Disappointing
This book comes with an undersized CD, including correct pronunciations of Hungarian words.

But alas, it lacks the Hungarian-English side of the dictionary, which apparently is available only under a separate cover. I wish I'd known that before buying it.

Instead, I recommend both Hippocrene's Hungarian-English/English-Hungarian Concise Dictionary and Hungarian-English/English-Hungarian Dictionary and Phrasebook, both of which include Hungarian words. English speakers need something including Hungarian words for sojourns in Budapest --- and definitely in the countryside, where very few people understand a word of English. ... Read more

Product Description
book2 - is available in many languages - is ideal for beginners - has 100 short and easy chapters - corresponds to the European levels A1 and A2 - requires no prior knowledge of grammar - covers the basic vocabulary - uses simple structures to help you learn a language - helps you to speak complete sentences immediately - applies the latest memory research All downloads can be accessed at www.book2.de.The audio files are available free of charge at www.book2.de. ... Read more

Product Description
This book aims to take users from scratch to having a solid base in Hungarian within six months, and to feel comfortable with the language in as little as three months. In only half an hour a day users will move ahead naturally until they are at ease with all the basic structures needed for communication and become familiar with the basic words and grammar of Hungarian. The method comprises two phases: the passive phase, in which users simply repeat what they hear and read, and the active phase, in which users begin to create sentences and imagine themselves in a variety of everyday situations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

just awesome
The approach to language learning used in this book is so perfectly geared to self-study (and for many people, language acquisition in general) that it's really difficult to understand why there aren't more books like this out there. Instead of offering yet another textbook piled up with randomly thrown-together dialogues followed by a vocabulary list and some grammar practice here and there, Hungarian with Ease presents a surprisingly effective system where the basics of the language essentially fall into place for the student through the use of extremely well-designed conversations and examples.

That might sound gimmicky but in practice it's pretty cool, almost like an FSI course minus the whole brutal mind-numbing jackhammer thing. Here's how it works: there are- count them- 85 lessons, most of which begin with a short dialogue of usually not much more than 10 lines. English translations are conveniently placed on the right-hand page directly opposite the conversations where they can be easily referenced or covered up as necessary (One of the few downsides is that the book is pretty adamant about keeping this format up, so sometimes the organization of the following material suffers and parts of the rest of the lesson might be hard to find or show up where you're not expecting them). New or confusing points from the dialogues are highlighted and explained in a short notes section, where the sometimes technical terminology is balanced by some pretty wacky "humor."

Coming up next are the `Exercises,' made up of 6 or so sentences (with translations) that let you watch the new grammar and vocabulary in action, and the `Corrections,' which are another 6 English sentences that you have to translate into Hungarian in a fill-in-the-blank kind of drill. These two sections are great because outside of the occasional geographic name early on when you're still supposed to be picking up pronunciation, absolutely everything used here is from material covered earlier in the text. No disembodied `supplementary/useful words,' just good practice and review. Instead of focusing on examples of this or that grammatical construction then moving on to the next one, these exercises are put together in a way that if you're paying attention (and you really have to pay attention with all the stuff that's going on here) you'll start to get a feel for how everything fits in together in actual Hungarian- as opposed to just learning grammatical bits in isolation as they come.

Every 7 lessons there are reviews of varying meatiness, and this is where you would go for verb conjugations, pronoun charts, and to fill the occasional gap not covered in the dialogues. A good deal of `cultural information' also ends up here. These review chapters tend to get pretty technical, but the authors are certainly not opposed to lightening up a particularly grueling grammatical structure with a little ditty or two illustrating its usage.

Another interesting feature is the complete lack of vocabulary lists. This way you have to learn new words in context and get a feel for how they interact in actual use, as opposed to the simple rote memorization of words as if they were a mechanical code for their English equivalents. The approach might take some getting used to, especially with an agglutinative language like Hungarian, but this has the added bonus of forcing you right off the bat to really pay attention to the form and usage of each new suffix and to the rules of vowel harmony. It's par for this course to wind up learning 'vizet' before the root 'víz,' but you're also probably more likely to come across these words with prefixes and suffixes attached in actual usage than to be faced with a steady progression of clean roots and stems. If there's ever any doubt, the book has a pretty hefty Hungarian to English glossary in the back (but no English-Hungarian).

It needs to be said that this is by no means an easy course. Although it doesn't take long to get into the swing of the system, the book is quite demanding on the student and the sheer amount of information available here would be downright intimidating if the lessons weren't designed so well. You start right off with a pretty decent conversation, and just keep building on what you know. Also, readers more interested in learning practical survival phrases may be horrified by sentences like "Why are we ordering chicken?" but the point here is that while you may never actually have the opportunity to say that in the real world, by the time you get there in the text, you know exactly how to do it.

There is no separate introduction to the Hungarian alphabet outside of a pretty dull two page list of letters and their approximate equivalents (which doesn't even show up on the tapes) so it might help if you have a little background in the sounds of the language before going into this. Luckily the alphabet isn't too much of a hassle and there's more than enough reading practice here to learn as you go along even if you're coming to the book as an absolute beginner. There's a strange little phonetic transcription for the dialogues that fortunately gets dropped after the 13th lesson and is probably best ignored. Depending on how you study, it might be useful to note that there is absolutely no English on the 4 tapes, and that the first thirteen lessons are recorded twice, first slowly, then at a more natural speed.

Apologies for gushing here. I absolutely love this book and only wish more authors would take the time and effort to design programs like this where you're made to look at and understand the structure of the language instead of just left to memorize key words and phrases and hope they come in handy at some point. Also, the fact that this is a translation/adaptation from a French original just makes the book more impressive, even if you'll end up learning more about Paris than you might have thought you would.

It's fairly common to refer to the uniqueness and isolation of the Hungarian language and to lament the fact that it so often ends up being ignored, so it really is encouraging to discover that a textbook as well-made as Hungarian with Ease does in fact exist. Unfortunately, it's going at a tough asking price and appears to be out of print already, but if you're serious about getting at the how and why of Hungarian and can track down a reasonably priced copy, there really isn't much out there better than this. Highly recommended.

The best alternative to going to Budapest!
Let's face it....Hungarian isn't easy! We can't really relate it to other languages (unless you speak Finnish...yeah right!!) But if you are ready to learn, Assimil does a great job of unravelling this puzzle which isHungarian. The tapes do an impeccable job of helping you grasp thephonetics and intonations (VERY important). The translations are done incorrect english so you understand and many times as word for wordtranslations as well so you develop a sense of word order (also VERYimportant). Every unclear detail is explained in notes at the bottom of thepage so you're never lost. Grammar is introduced gradually so as to notoverwhelm the student. Text is practical, realistic and USEFUL! Beingobjective, the lessons can be a bit much towards the middle. There's a lotto learn! English and Hungarian have almost NOTHING in common. You can'tget around that! Take it slowly! It will come. it's the next best thing tohaving a private tutor! ... Read more

Product Description
English to Hungarian dictionary (NOT Hungarian to English). 1987 hardcover. ... Read more