I learned Hungarian late in life (2011)
I learned some hungarian in my 20s. Tough language, but so beautiful.<p>I&#x27;d say there are some very weird things about the language. I had to wait until my second semester to be able to say &quot;I have X&quot;. There&#x27;s no such verb as &quot;having&quot; in hungarian, but you use possessive + being to indicate you have something. And we only learnt possessive suffixes in 2nd semester.<p>I&#x27;d say that something that helped a lot was that in early 2000s there wasn&#x27;t that much people speaking English in Budapest. So, no cheating.<p>But also, trying to speak Hungarian would get people smiling at you for trying. People would say &quot;But Hungarian is the most difficult language in the world!&quot; (maybe not true, but I&#x27;d hear that a lot).<p>After a year and a half, I could communicate with my Mother in law, with some mistakes, but enough to get around and get complimented on my skills.<p>Couldn&#x27;t continue living in Budapest, had to return to my home country in Latin America. But later in life, got the opportunity to move to Berlin. I thought &quot;Well, I learnt Hungarian, I can learn German&quot;. How wrong I was.<p>Being able to cheat (Everybody speaks English) and trying to do this in your 30&#x27;s is much harder.<p>Not only that, I guess what what made everything just not worthy was Germans giving you shit every time you make a mistake, or your 5-vowel mother language makes it hard to pronounce things. Not only that, but then if you make mistakes you get judged immediately as somebody that &quot;didn&#x27;t want to integrate&quot;. People would generalize and now, after 10 years. With 2 half-german daughters I don&#x27;t want to learn the language.