If you live in Cluj, you might want to learn Romanian before Hungarian. And there are some adequate Romanian lessons that we covered elsewhere.
However, Hungarian is a slightly easier language. It doesn’t have genders, and therefore there are fewer agreements with adjectives and all the rest to worry about. Also, the plurals are more regular than Romanian. Sure there are more cases, but they tend to be predictable.
And as you probably already know, we have been testing English, German, Romanian and Hungarian lessons in Cluj, in the surrounding areas, and on the web. The worst course we could find is one offered by the European Union to French speakers.
Why name and shame the worst? Well, just in case language teachers or app developers read our page. When you know why a course is bad, maybe you won’t make the same mistakes.
One, it is AI generated slop.
This doesn’t automatically make it bad. However, it is bad AI, and hallucinates. The rhythm is unnatural (while Hungarian is not a tonal language, it is like English and Romanian in that emphasis and prosody can change the meaning of a word or sentence. If you want to hear unnatural speech, might as well use some crappy app like Luodingo.
Two, it gives bad advice.
It claims that Hungarians give their family name last. Well, English speakers do that, French speakers do that, but Hungarians often do the opposite. This is just one amateur piece of bad advice given on the very first lesson. It’s like an April fools. I could have a five year old proofread the page and create a better result.
Three, it goes too fast.
Unless you are at least about B1 or B2 level Hungarian, the first lesson will be way too fast for you. Full sentences are given, spat out in bad Hungarian by an AI, at speeds that native speakers only use when they are excited about gossip or they need the toilet. Okay, there are other times you might speak fast, but you get the point. Big words and thrown together at such an unintelligble rate that it is hard to catch the errors. Maybe that is the point, to try to trick the proofreaders.
It is not beginner friendly
The vocabulary is not the kind of thing you would expect in a first language. There is some explanation, in French, which is much slower and uses far simpler words than the Hungarian.
The animation is creepy
Okay, let’s not hate on the animation too much. But, I mean, if they didn’t spend the money on writers, proofreaders, language specialists (or even speakers) or actors, you think they’d spend something on animation, right? No, the animation is just more creepy AI slop. Or some cheap webtune auto-do stuff, which is even worse. Worse than AI slop? Yup, it is possible.
You can see it for yourself, if you want. We think it might be the worst language page ever created, but then we saw something created by a British company which hired East Europeans to teach English. Those East Europeans had an English level below B1, and the advice given was horrendous. But hey, it was cheap! What made it so bad is that it was written with such confidence, by people who didn’t realise that on and onto had different meanings.
No, actually, this AI generated slop is even worse.
Other terrible uses of Hungarian include a commercial for a recent smurf movie. It switches between Hungarian, Polish, and perhaps even Romanian at one point. But hey, aren’t Hungarian infants multilingual anyway? The marketers of Smurfs seem to think so.
And don’t get us started on the bad dubbing of Smurfs into Estonian, where you can still hear the English soundtrack underneath. Don’t they use three sound tracks, so you can replace the language track with one in your own language? That’s like, simple film editing 101.
In any case, the European Union screws up again. As someone who has applied for government tenders, I wonder, how do they pick these winners? I mean, is the goal to make the worst resources humanly possible, or what?