Hungary, Hungarian, the EU and Ukraine

Time perhaps to catch up on Hungary and the turn from language learning to cycling home from next week – through Slovenia, Austria, CH and France, dropping in on old Reuter colleagues on the way in Geneva and Paris.

Seems my Hungarian continues to come along nicely. My last night in Budapest brought reunification with very old friend Zsuzsa Simonfi, who with her parents in 1983 had hosted myself, Jutta and our then just two boys at their Lutheran rectory in the north of town.

Based by then in Vienna, we were in Budapest, with other friends from the West, to meet families from the East Berlin Cathedral Choir with whom Jutta and I had both sung for our four years based there.

Banned from travelling West, East Germans below pensionable age could at that time of course meet folk from West Germany only on fellow Warsaw Pact territory,  most easily in Hungary.

So, first time properly in four decades, here I was last night with Zsuzsa (looking of course as youthful now as she was at 20) and her pastor husband Janos (very busy in old communist days with Hungarian communities in neighbouring Romania) for an entire evening – conversing in just Hungarian.

I’m sure I made zillions of horrendous mistakes (not difficult), but it seemed to work, and most of the time I think we all knew largely what everyone was saying.

Back now in Szeged on my gathering way out, my language teacher David who’s based here is quite proud that after – what, 80 hours now, possibly approaching 100, of individual language tuition, with Zsuzsa and Janos I sort-of passed the end-of-course exam.

The which said, I was a bit disappointed this morning to read in the Economist that Hungarian takes only twice as long for Brits and Americans to learn (US State Dept calculations) as French or Spanish.

Forty-four weeks against 22.

Arabic and Mandarin, it seems, take double even that – and here was I, smugly thinking that Hungarian was the toughest language.

My very dear BBC friend Vali Tóth with whom I also caught up on a Zoom call from here last week, teaches British diplomats Hungarian from scratch.

She says she can get the best up to fluent C1 level (C2 is native, A1 is beginner, and I’m now somewhere between good B2 and very shaky C1) in six months’ intensive work. Not bad.

So having slogged away at the language for so long, admittedly only really seriously again for the last two years, maybe I’m actually more of a laggard than I thought.

OK, this (surprise, surprise) is turning into a longer post than I intended, but warmest thanks to David (pictured below) for his endless patience with my slowly improving skills. The intensity of our work has been a bit like individual therapy, on both sides, and we’ll miss each other. Till the next time, anyway.

Also adding below some pictures again illustrating the intensity (and cost, I imagine) of Hungarian governmental effort under Viktor Orban to stir up passions against Ukraine being allowed to join the European Union.

On my 30-minute bus ride from my digs to the train station this morning, I must have passed 15 identical posters with the identical message – we don’t want Ukraine as a member, because we’ll have to pay the price. Wonder why I’ve not seen any posters yet making the opposite case…

Interestingly, the issue came up passionately in a long conversation with the mother of another old friend of mine here last week, now in her 80s.

She’s originally from what’s now Romanian Transylvania, in the view of most folk here, core Hungarian land brutally, wrongly, humiliatingly, wrenched away by the post-World-War-One Treaty of Trianon in 1920.

Her support for Orban’s position was unambiguous, intense, tapping into a root experience, genetic almost, of what’s felt by many here to be a history of Ukrainian humiliation of Hungary and Hungarians,.

One might recall also of course that the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 (not that the soldiers had any say in it) was done in the name of a country one of whose most important constituent republics was Soviet Ukraine.

While hard to separate chickens from propaganda eggs, and even if Hungarians are not exactly happy with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, some things, like the Hungarian language, are very complicated.

Enjoy the pix…