We were the kind of students whose favourite school subject always happened to be the foreign langauge we studied. As much I had been a fan of literature or history, I would always pick English whenever I had to name my alltime favorite. I am sure this holds true for many translators. First, we fell in love with the beauty of words and phrases of another language and are eager to learn about them. Then, and only then, we start seeking pleasure from comparing the foreign language to our very own and beginning the process of translation.
I honestly believe that one cannot become a great language pro without having a wild passion and utmost respect for his or her own mother tongue. You can only appreciate the art of subtlety once you have experienced it. You have to become an expert in your mother tongue before mastering a foreign one.
The nature of your native language pretty much determines how easily you can learn foreign languages. I give you a good example; Neo-Latino languages have basically the same logics to follow and very similar grammar rules. A native speaker of Italian could learn Spanish without much trouble. Similarly, a Slovenian native would (may not speak, but) understand almost any other Slavic languages (except for Russian). For Dutch people, it is pretty simple to learn the basics of German.
Speaking of me, I have never had any of these similarities when I started learning foreign languages. My mother tongue is very unique and expectional in many ways. Hungarian is one of the Uralic languages and belongs to the branch of Finno-Ugric. In Europe, Hungarian is the most widely spoken language which does not belong to the Indo-European languages. It is spoken by cirka 15 million people around the globe.
Hungarian, or "magyar" as we call it, is the 4th hardest language to learn for foreigners. (According to the statistics of www.mylanguages.org) It is followed by Mandarin, Arabic and Tuyuca (one of the languages of the Amazon). How can it be that hard?
To give you a clue, let's just say a normal European language has like 4-5 cases and noun forms. Hungarian has 35. Our language is also full of idioms and suffixes. Unlike most languages, we do not use any prepositions - our language is agglutinative which means that we form words by joining morphemes together. To top all of that, we have a high amount of vowels and accents as well.
Despite the difficult grammar, it is truly worth a try to learn it because it is utterly beautiful. I know I am biased but I have heard this from many foreigners in my life. We have our most beautiful words (according to a famous Hungarian poet, Dezső Kosztolányi) completely different-sounding than in any other language I can recall.
These are láng (means flame); gyöngy (pearl); kard (sword); csók (kiss); vér (blood); szív (heart); sír (grave) and my favourite, édesanya (mother).
Which one seems nice to you? What is your opinion about Hungarian (if you ever got to hear it spoken)? How about your mother tongue?
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