I started learning Hungarian (my first non-Indo-European language and the first one I'm teaching myself) some time this year, perhaps in June. I can't remember when exactly I made that decision, and my study habits have changed quite a bit since then. I did a Pod101 lesson a week at most in the beginning and then nothing for a while due to family matters. It wasn't until the beginning of September that I became more serious about it, started studying more and doing at least a little every day, even on stressful days where all I can do is listen to some music. If anyone is doubting my sanity now, let me tell you that it's been fun, suffixes, agglutination, megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért and all. I grew up with the language that gave us Rindfleischettiketierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, I'm not scared of long words. Bring it on, Magyar!
Obligatory bad "haha Hungarian difficult haha long words" joke aside, I could genuinely turn this entire post into a love letter to the language and it would get way too long. But I want to make it about progress. Because yes, considering the short amount of time I've been studying, I think I'm seeing some minor progress. They're baby steps, small somewhat intangible things, but they're there.
Naturally I started out knowing absolutely nothing, sometimes I didn't even recognise my own TL when playing Languageguesser. Yes. Don't look at my shame. I hear familiar words all the time now, and though I still can't say I understand the language, sometimes I can still make out whole (albeit simple) sentences. The first one I ever understood was from a Kozmosz song I think.
Speaking of conprehension, the language used to sound like one long string of syllables to me (oof there's another long word joke in there), and I couldn't quite make out the individual components of a sentence. Now I can make out the patterns a bit better (though not all the time) and know what to look up to make sense of a sentence. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't apply to every sentence I hear (far from it) , and when I hear Hungarian most of the time I still have no clue mi a **** is going on (what?) but what do you expect after such a short time? It's still progress.
My brain also tries to produce Hungarian sentences all the time now, so much so that it's attempted to incorporate some basic Hungarian into my dreams at least twice. It fails quite often (read: I ask my language partner or check deepl to see if what I came up with was right only to realise I wasn't even close), but it's trying. And then, sometimes, it does get one right or almost right. They're simple sentences, of course, and again, this doesn't mean I can speak, let alone have a whole conversation in Hungarian. It takes way more time to get there, so that was never my expectation.
Lastly, and this one is a bit harder to explain, when I study with anki I don't translate as much anymore. I use two decks with single words, expressions and sample sentences, and while I used to automatically translate (or try to translate) each card to English, German or Bulgarian in my head, I don't really do that anymore. When I know what a sentence means, it doesn't go that extra route in my brain in order for me to understand it, it just makes sense as it is. I don't know if I'm making any sense at all.
But anyway, I am fully aware that those are tiny little baby steps. Barely any progress at all in the grand scheme of things. I didn't become fluent within a month, I feel like I'm still only getting to know the language. But they're what I've managed so far, and it's been fun and exciting to go through these early stages of language learning once again, and so I'm still proud. And I thought I might share these experiences, because they're still progress, they still count, and they're still something to be happy about and proud of. And they're definitely more realistic than "I learned to speak xy in a month."
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