[gerdesj]

I gather that Hungarian is nigh on completely regular with respect to symbol to sound. I was told this by a Hungarian, speaking English. Hungarian does seem to have a lot of diacritics which implies to me a deliberate formalism.

[nulbyte]

I am learning Hungarian, and I find this much truer than the usual claim that it's phonetic one-to-one. Some letters change sounds in certain instances, but there are discernable patterns, unlike much of English. I find it fairly easy to spell a word heard, even if it's the first time encountering. Of course, it also helps that Hungarians are usually a root with a known affix or five.

[caddemon]

Bit of a tangent but what are you using to learn Hungarian? I've been casually using Duolingo which is decent for picking up vocab and the pronunciations like you mentioned. However I don't like the way it presents the grammar rules at all. Have you found any good guides for learning more about conjugations, word ordering, etc.? I'm interested in learning Hungarian more seriously but would want to find a source I'm confident in first.

[nulbyte]

I started with Duolingo. The tips help, but you can only see them on the web, not in the mobile app. Sadly, they deleted all the prerecorded samples and replaced them with awful TTS. The real recordings were far more useful in picking up nuances to the pronunciation, especially tone.

I also booked several weeks of Skype classes with a native Hungarian speaker; that was very helpful. You can find several on Facebook or iTalki. I plan to take some more online classes, just haven't gotten around to it yet. I also watch news in Hungarian on YouTube.

[scythe]

Non-Indo-European languages have an ironic advantage in that aspect, since they were generally only Latinized once, rather than accumulating various orthographies over the medieval period. Hungarian, unlike most European languages (but like Finnish), is Uralic. Pinyin is fully regular too, even though it looks very strange to an English speaker.

[denton-scratch]

I thought Finnish was categorised as "finno-ugric", which I understood to be a language group that included only Finnish, Magyar, and Basque. Perhaps my understanding is outdated.

[DFHippie]

Well, definitely not Basque. Basque is a language isolate, like Burushaski and Sumerian. It definitely is related to other languages at some time depth, but the depth is so great that this relation is impossible to discern now with any confidence. And I don't think anyone with any credibility currently argues that its closest extant relations are languages like Finnish and Hungarian whose homeland is north-central Asia.

[scythe]

Finno-Ugric is a subset of Uralic. Basque is not Uralic language and may be an isolate, although distant connections to various minor language families have been proposed.

[denton-scratch]

I'm glad to have my ignorance dispelled :-)

[dllthomas]

Polish orthography is pretty good about following its rules, and while there's a few more of them than (say) Spanish it's pretty approachable. I can do a fair job turning text to sound (or vice-versa, although there's a little more ambiguity that way) but for my presumably terrible accent.

Polish grammar is terrifying.