Van és nincs

In the last lesson you learned that Hungarian drops "is" when identifying: Ez egy ház. But there are two places where you must use van:

Existence and location. Van itt egy bank? "Is there a bank here?" A szálloda ott van. "The hotel is over there." Whenever you say something exists somewhere, van is required. Its negative is nincs (not nem van): Nincs itt bank. The plurals are vannak and nincsenek.

Possession. Hungarian has no verb "to have". It says, literally, "to-me there-is": Nekem van egy kutyám. "I have a dog." The thing owned takes a possessive ending — -m for "my" — and the sentence uses van. To say you lack something: Nincs kutyám. "I have no dog."

If you speak Arabic or Hebrew, you already think this way: nekem van egy könyvem is built exactly like عندي كتاب and יש לי ספר — "to me there is a book". The negative nincs pénzem matches ما عندي مال and אין לי כסף. English and German speakers have to unlearn "have"; for you it is one line.