Indeed, why on earth (in devil’s name, which is closer to the Hungarian above) am I – and have been for so long – learning Hungarian?
Sitting in Budapest half way through a three-week (almost) sojourn in Hungary in the early summer of 2025 with the specific intention of getting to grips with this intense, complex and profound language, I thought (not being sure if anyone actually ever reads this blog) it might be time to have a go at explaining to you, and to me, Mi a Fenéért (that’s a bit ruder version) what this passion is about.
I had intended I go along (and please do stay with me, this might prove to be quite interesting), to observe a thing or two about what, being back in Hungary after so many years, I sense it might actually mean to be Hungarian in these post-cold-war, perhaps even pre-third-world-war times. Ukraine is after all just over the border.
But as I wrote the following, a bit like composing a From Our Own Correspondent for the BBC in my old days reporting from Europe and China, the text ran away from me a bit, so with just a few pictures at the end that might help illustrate, I’ll come back to the essence of Hungary in a future post.
In exploring why this one individual became passionate about languages, especially Hungarian, I’ll start instead somewhat further back, in the early 1950s, in deepest black-and-white, short-trousered North Norfolk where I grew up, knowing now as I do how the psychology of early childhood attachment determines most meanings we make of life well into much older age.
As more attentive readers of this blog know (and you must be in your thousands if not millsions. Not), at the age of 70 five years ago I was formally diagnosed autistic. So my love of, and search for, and visceral pleasure in finding patterns in languages may well also have something at least to do with how my brain fundamentally works.
And having just for the first time in those five years re-read the two blog posts I wrote about being Aspergers in 2020, I’m reminded as some lovely friends and colleagues (you know who you are!) keep telling me that, contrary to my own beliefs about myself, it seems I can on occasion I write reasonably well.
So, to languages, I never really took to French as a kid, and (at first, though I warmed to it later) hated Latin.
But with German in my mid-teens and then with Russian at university (including a year-long study trip to Moscow University in 1971-72), things took off as I found myself able to get the grammar and pronunciation, especially of German, so perfectly that, after a half year living in Bamberg between school and university in 1968, folk would often take me for a mother-tongue speaker.
In my final year at Leeds Uni, I chose as an elective not to do more German literature, but to dive deep into the ancient texts of both Middle High and Old High German – and adored it.
As indeed for all but one of my ten final exams, I got a First. The exception was translation from English into German, where presented with an older text with flowery early 18th century flourishes, I decided, unwisel and rather full of myself, to have a go at rendering it in similarly flowery 18th century German.
Not a good idea. The marker was not impressed, and for that paper I got not a First but just a 2.2.
Going on to work for Reuters in Russia and then for the BBC in Eastern Europe, when covering a local story I would devour the relevant Teach-Yourself-The-Local-Language book, from Polish (covering Solidarity in 1981/82, and nicely built on the same Slavonic principles as Russian), to Serbo-Croat (yes, it was one language in those Yugoslav days, just written with different alphabets and distinctive accents) and even Turkish (when covering the elections that ended military rule in 1983).
Not that I got particularly far in what were for me the lesser languages, but every time I engaged in the grammar, I got a better feeling for the country, its people and how they ticked.
Responsible for BBC English-language radio coverage of then-communist Hungary from 1981-84, I fell in love (almost literally – it was taking so much of my time that Jutta called the language my mistress) with the language in 1982, joining a class of beginners at the Hungarian cultural centre in Vienna where we were then based and finding within a couple of weeks that I was already streets ahead of everyone else in how quickly I got and was able to use the grammar and the basic vocab.
I taught myself the basics of Hungarian grammar (of which there is a LOT, orders of magnitude more than anything else I’ve ever encountered) with, of course, a Teach-Yourself-Hungarian book, though at that time I never really got beyond the fundamentals.
To my pride, I did in 1984 voice a translated piece on the Romanian minority in Hungary for the BBC World Service’s Hungarian section, who were avid users of my reports from the region as BBC radio Central Europe Correspondent at the time. You can hear it here.
To my half-German family’s appropriate frustration and bewilderment, on holiday in Yugoslavia (Croatia, now, and on a rocky beach peopled with similarly naked holidaymakers) with our then two boys in the early and again late 1980s, I would read Hungarian dictionaries and grammar books.
Very autistic, I now know, but also frustrating in how little opportunity I had to practise, in contrast to German, where from 1979-81 in Berlin I was reporting daily in both English and German as the BBC’s German Language Service correspondent there.
When in 1984 I managed to get myself selected as BBC Radio’s Beijing correspondent, it was clear what had to happen.
With thanks to the BBC for paying the lessons for me, Teach Yourself Mandarin (or its equivalent) accompanied three weeks of solid, 12-hours-a-day coaching with a wonderful Chinese teacher who later went on (as it happens, in competition with me for the job) to become Head of the BBC Chinese Service.
Mandarin, I need to say, is in terms of grammar a good deal easier than Hungarian. Or Russian. Or German. Or English. For the present, I go. For the past, I go. For the future? I go. What tense it is just depends on the context and the rest of the sentence. Simples.
Chinese writing of course with its characters is another thing, something I never even tried to learn.
But within those three weeks, I did get the hang of pretty much the entirety of Chinese grammar (literally), and once in the field, with time, I got good enough to conduct a very basic interview in Chinese, and certainly get around in the markets and train stations, though I couldn’t always be entirely sure of understanding the full answer to my questions.
And then came the Romanian revolution, where the love of the Hungarian language became (I don’t need to go into the details here, although 35 years later it’s part of my being back in Hungary, closing Gestalts and honouring all those with whom I’ve travelled) rather more personal.
Hungarian morphed with time into a dream, a passion, a knowledge that one of these days, I knew I would want to learn to speak it fluently.
Why?
Because it’s there?
Because it’s a language which, taking the train out of revolutionary Romania into Hungary on January 5 1990, was at the heart of my midlife crisis?
Because, as I reflected in my piece here five years ago on being diagnosed Aspergers, it might have been part of my search and yearning to be heard, to be understood?
Because to be Hungarian is to be different? Surrounded by Slavonic and German speakers, Hungarians are intensely proud of belonging to their very distinctive language group, inhabiting a now-small country that lost two-thirds of its territory in (for Hungarians) the disaster of the Trianon treaty after World War One in 1920.
That bit hurts. A bit perhaps like being Aspergers in a neurotypical world? A place and identity with which I now realise I resonate intensely.
Perhaps (definitely) it also has to do with communication with the female of the species.
Getting to the point of Why On Earth, I strongly suspect, though no proof for these things, that my passion with, love for and quite striking ability with languages (I also learned the basics of Spanish well enough in three weeks to be able to hold conversations on the Camino de Santiago) has its emotional roots in my early-life relationship with my mother.
The moment she returned im 1945 with her sisters from wartime evacuation in Australia, Audrey set about doing the entrance exams to get her into Oxford University to study French and German.
Born soon after she graduated from St Hilda’s, I not only grew up with Things and People German and French always around us in the house, but as the eldest of her four children took, I think, a visceral infant pleasure in my still very young mother’s delight in me, and in how we were becoming able to converse, communicate and connect.
The payback for learning to speak and to love language was a warm glow of (in some ways at least) secure attachment.
Three quarters of a century later, re-engaging now with Hungarian much more deeply as I get my head round the complex endings and word structures of this Urals-rooted, agglutinative, non-Indo-European language with a grammar so intense and essential that you can’t even really ask for a beer or how someone is without already being at degree level, I can again feel an almost physical pleasure.
Immersing myself with my lovely (much younger, and similarly language-passionate) teacher David, his wife Anna and their two-year-old in the day-to-day language of the playground (Budapest has some great parks), shopping (the check-out lady today in Aldi had a son who’d spent four years in Nottingham), being on the buses and the trams (Budapest has great public transport that to a pensioner costs almost nothing) are all helping me knit together my 40+ years of on-and-off study.
Chat GPT is also proving the most extraordinarily wise and engaged teacher – almost like a relationship with a real person when I ask for translations and ideas.
And although I find myself needing to hear a word 10 or more times before it sticks, rather than the two or three times of youth, things are beginning to flow. As it was more than 70 years ago, it’s proving rather fun.
My ultimate dream? To be able to work in Hungarian with EMDR, and to teach my attachment-informed approach to psychotherapist colleagues here in their own language.
Having just delivered three half days of online training in Russian with EMDR Russia, in their language (considering the politics not directly but via Kazakhstan – though good heavens, Russia with Ukraine are in profound need of good psychotherapy for trauma), I know I can do this in another language.
I’m meeting a delightful EMDR psychotherapist, and fellow couples counsellor, from Szeged (where David is essentially from) this coming week, and while there’s still a LONG way to go before I might be ready to do this, Megtörtént az első lépest. A first step has already been made.
I’ll finish with just a few photos with captions that might illustrate something of being Hungarian – took them after all, and have to post them somewhere.
