I am Hungarian, my native language is Hungarian, but I use almost only English on the Internet. I started learning English at school, I thought I was good at it. A year before the other high school exams, I passed the English high school exam successfully. Now I say I learned the basics at school, but the internet was what really helped me to learn English. When I first started using social networking sites where there were few of us Hungarians, I had to use the translator a lot. Then I learned more and more words, understood more and more the rules of grammar and had to translator less and less.
However, the translator does not completely solve our problems, because I think if someone does not have a basic knowledge of the language, they can’t use the translator well. I have been faced many times with the translator not translating my sentences correctly. Anyone who doesn’t have the slightest understanding of the language they should use may be sending a completely different message than what they are wanting to send.
Many times I have to formulate the Hungarian text to be translated completely differently than I actually put it, because this is how I get the result I want. I don’t use translator when I write a comment or a short post, message, because it’s faster and easier to write them without it. But I always copy a longer text into the translator and read and correct the translated text. There is always something to fix.
The biggest reason is due to grammatical differences. We Hungarians use verbs based on the person acting. I will show an example.
In english:
I am eating.
You are eating.
He/She is eating.
We are eating.
You are eating.
They are eating.
The same in hungarian:
Én eszek.
Te eszel.
Ő eszik.
Mi eszünk.
Ti esztek.
Ők esznek.
Do you see? The word is different everywhere. The verb varies according to the person acting. With the verb we already express who is doing the act, so we often omit i / you / She / We etc. This is one of the problems when we use a translator , because many times we would want to write “He / She”, but the translator says “you”.
The other thing that usually causes confusion is that we don't differentiate between the sexes when we say He / She, we use both in the same way.
He=ő,
She=ő
So it often happens that in the translated text we seem to be talking about a boy, but in fact we were thinking of a girl.
So I recommend everyone who uses a translator to translate the text twice. Translate from your own language to the language you want, then back. So if you may not be able to fix it, you will notice the mistakes.
Finally, it is a little interesting what is one of the reasons why it is difficult to learn Hungarian. I will show our ABC to you:
A Á B C Cs D Dz Dzs E É F G Gy H I Í J K L Ly M N Ny O Ó Ö Ő P Q R S Sz T Ty U Ú Ü Ű V W X Y Z Zs