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FOREWORD Contrastive Studies at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church from 2015 to 2020, the present author decided that it must contain some theory, but should not be too theoretical. There is no point in having a course on the history of CL and the details of the various theories proposed and refuted as well as the long forgotten controversies surrounding the development of the discipline if the course has nothing to do with the original aim of CL, i.e. helping foreign language teaching and learning. Developments in second language acquisition research and the practice of second and foreign language teaching have made many or most of the theoretical discussions on CL conducted in the 1960s to 1980s irrelevant. Therefore, the aim of a course in CL must be to acquaint students with those CL concepts that have retained their significance over the years, and to focus on those L1-L2 contrasts that have actually been found to impact learning. That is, a CL course should be about language contrasts (in this case, Hungarian—English linguistic contrasts) rather than about contrastive linguistics. In view of the above, the original title of this coursebook (English—Hungarian Contrastive Studies) was changed to Hungarian—English Linguistic Contrasts, and the subtitle A practical approach was added to indicate that the course is designed to be of practical use, helping students to raise their metalinguistic awareness and to directly improve their linguistic competence in English. This endeavour explains the main features of this coursebook, in which practical usefulness takes precedence over theoretical discussion. The book is not a-theoretical: it does rely on linguistics and CL literature, including studies on Hungarian—English contrasts (some of the author’s own), but it is not designed to be just another course in Linguistics. It tries to integrate as much theory as necessary with practice: most chapters start with practical examples to be discussed, and the various chapters consistently refer back to the basic theoretical concepts presented in the first two chapters, and plenty of exercises are provided. It is hoped that studying Hungarian—English linguistic contrasts in this way will benefit students more than a theoretical course would. The first two chapters have been designed to give a summary of the most important principles and concepts proposed by classical contrastive analysis, highlighting those that have retained their relevance for foreign language teaching over the years: concepts like divergent categories, transferability, primary counterpart, etc. These two chapters provide the theoretical framework that is needed to explain how linguistic contrasts may impact foreign language learning. Chapter 3 deals with contrasts between the Hungarian and English phonological systems. Upper-class students who have studied English phonology in their first year must have had lots of information on this topic, especially if they studied phonology from Nadasdy’s coursebook (Nadasdy 2006), so what +10 +
