Sounds and letters

Hungarian spelling is close to perfectly regular. Once you know the alphabet, you can pronounce any word on sight — there are no silent letters and almost no exceptions. This is the single biggest gift Hungarian gives a beginner, so spend a session on it now and stop guessing forever.

Below is the full alphabet: 40 letters, each with a real word and a note on how to say it. Play each example before moving on — reading the note is not the same as hearing the sound. Once you've been through it once, two things are worth knowing on top of it.

Stress is always on the first syllable. Always. Not sometimes, not usually. BU-da-pest, KÖ-szö-nöm, vi-szont-LÁ-tás-ra — no, that last one is VI-szont-lá-tás-ra too. If you remember nothing else, remember this one, because getting it wrong is what makes a foreign accent obvious.

The accent marks are not stress marks. This trips up speakers of every language on this site. In Hungarian, á and a are two different vowels, not a loud a and a quiet a. Same for é/e, ó/o, ő/ö, ú/u, ű/ü. Swapping them changes the word:

Play the pairs below and listen for the difference. It is not subtlety — these are as distinct as "bat" and "bought".

Then there are the digraphs. Eight pairs of letters and one trio spell single sounds: cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs, and dzs. The one that catches everyone is s and sz: Hungarian s is English sh, and Hungarian sz is English s. So szia starts like "see", and és ends like "ash".