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GENERAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN HUNGARIAN AND ENGLISH
those of my friends (or those belonging to my friends)
A conseguence of this typological difference is that Hungarian learners must
learn to redistribute the meanings included in a word form over several words.
Surprisingly, this difference is not difficult to learn. No Hungarian learner will
try to say "friends-my instead of my friends or invent an English ending to
mark the accusative in English. Consider another simple example:
a barátaiddal — with your friends
Experience shows that after learning the preposition with and the possessive
determiner your, Hungarian learners will not find it difficult to use such
phrases.
This confirms the claim made against classical contrastive linguistics,
namely that a difference does not automatically lead to difficulty of learning.
The same can be observed in many other areas of phonology, morphology, and
syntax. There is little difficulty when a feature of L1 Hungarian is absent in L2
English, or when two or more L1 forms correspond to one L2 form. For instance,
a characteristic feature of Hungarian phonology and morphology is vowel
harmony, responsible for the various allomorphs of adverbial endings like -on/
en/on, -ban/ben, etc. Equating these with a single English form (preposition)
does not create any difficulty for Hungarian learners; the difficulty comes with
learning which preposition must be used in different contexts. Geminate con¬
sonants and palatalised consonants, as well as some vowels (6, ii) do not exist
in English, and of course learning not to use them does not cause any difficul¬
ty (except for the difficulty of learning that double consonants appearing in
the spelling of English words are not pronounced as geminate consonants). It
is not difficult to learn that except in the 3" person singular there are no ver¬
bal inflections in English — the only difficulty comes from overextending this
rule and not using the -s ending where it is necessary.
In a similar way, the difficulty of learning English verb forms derives from
the difficulty of learning the meanings of the various English auxiliaries and
their manipulation in questions and negation, which we may regard as an
inherent difficulty of English, rather than from the analytic/synthetic contrast.
Consider this example:
Elolvashatnäm? — Could I read it?
The learning task here is learning the meaning and use of the auxiliary could
and the rules of question formation. Having to express 1% person and object
with a pronoun instead of a verbal ending and using an auxiliary instead ofa
suffix (-hat/het) does not appear to be difficult.
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