Akarok Magyarul tanulni (I want to learn Hungarian)

as i sit here in front of my hungarian lesson book, eating strawberry icecream out of a winnie the pooh plastic bowl, i contemplate the difficulties of the hungarian language---a language that even the US embassador to Hungary struggles with (or refuses to learn).... “you have to be a genius to learn Hungarian,” he once remarked to the St. Louis Dispatch. Please keep in mind that the US embassador to Hungary is George Herbert Walker III. Yep, a first cousin of George W. Bush ---I've always wondered how one becomes an ambassador. anyways, im looking forward to hearing him speak tomorrow at the reception for david mccullough, ill let you all know how it goes (the honorable ambassador manages to be in town for the reception for mccullough, but not for me????).

anyways, back to my struggle with hungarian......as you may know, hungarian is in the ugric-finno language family, most closely related to estonian and finnish. if i only knew estonian. the language is based on 24 grammatical cases (e.g., absessive, ablative, absolutive, adessive, adverbial, allative, etc)---hell i dont even know what those words mean in english. in addition hungarian is based on vowel sound agreement---this part i like, i try to rhyme the end of the word with the beggining of it and i think that usually works, or at least it sounds poetic to me.

throughout my hungarian struggle, im reminded of a recent article i read about a new computer algorithm that has been developed that can 'read' a text of a specific language and then develops its own language rules based on the structure of the text and then can develop new sentences based on these rules (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug05/
comp.learns.language.ssl.html). this is somewhat similar to how a 2 year old learns a language, without knowledge of specific rules, but makes rules up as he or she goes along. ive decided to return to this approach in hungarian, i.e. screw the grammar lessons and just make up my own rules as I go along. hopefully it will all work itself out in my head, just like my favorite three year olds.