Magyaróra! (Hungarian Language School)

Today was the last day of intensive Hungarian language school,. It was advertised as being 80 hours, but that seems to include a lot of the break time. I think we had more like 60 class hours.

There were about 40 BSM students who arrived early to take the language class, and they split us into three groups. I was in a class of 11 students, and over the course of three weeks we had three different teachers. The first week we had one teacher, who was fantastic. I thought class was a little slow, but it felt organized, and we did a variety of activities, learned a lot of songs, and spent time practicing pronunciation. The last two weeks of the class, we kept going back and forth somewhat unpredictably between two teachers who didn't seem to communicate with each other as much as would have been optimal, and the course didn't feel well-organized anymore.

The style of the course was pretty similar to that of the Azerbaijani courses I took last summer. The language school has its own textbook, and in Azerbaijan one of my teachers had written the text we used. The textbook was almost entirely in Hungarian; new vocab was mostly illustrated with pictures instead of translations. A lot of the exercises were drill-like, and later on in the course we spent a lot of time doing role-plays based off of learned dialogues. The biggest difference between this class and my Azerbaijani classes was that this wasn't an immersion experience at all. The teachers almost always spoke English to us.

For the last day, we didn't really have class. In the morning, we took a test and filled out feedback forms, and then each group wrote and practiced a play. We performed the plays for each other after lunch. All three groups chose to write plays based on the continuing story in our textbook, which was about an American student named Kevin, his Hungarian friend Peter, and Peter's sister Csilla. The story was told mostly through dialogues at the end of each unit, and we were always excited to read the next dialogue. The story was much better than similar ones in other textbooks I've used.

I mentioned songs earlier. A lot of my language learning experiences have involved learning songs, but I don't think I've ever been in a group of students that has loved singing so much. I've yet to find a video with the right tune for my group's favorite song, "Csipp Csepp," so here's a video of our second favorite song, "Tigris."

(YouTube is now recommending that I watch videos of Hungarian children's songs. Thank you, language school?)

I did learn a lot of Hungarian. The language school estimates that at the end of the course students who have mastered the material should be at an A2 proficiency level on the Common European Framework (CEFR). (I think it might be more like A1+, but while the tasks for that level are defined, it's not often used to describe proficiency.) This means that I'm pretty comfortable doing routine things like introducing myself, shopping, making plans, and describing a daily routine, but I mostly use present tense, and it's still really helpful if other people speak slowly and clearly. That's about where I expected to be at this point, so I'm pleased with what I learned.

I chose to do the language course in part because I love learning languages, but the reason my grand-sibb Marguerite recommended that I do it was because of the bonds that the students who come early form with each other. The forty of us have been here for nearly three weeks now, and we've spent a lot of time with each other already, both in and out of class. I'm definitely glad to have gotten to know people before math classes start.