Learning Our ABC's

It's back to Kindergarten for Larry and I. We began Hungarian lessons this week! We have a teacher that is coming to our house twice a week after the kids go to bed. She is very nice and patient and will gear the lessons toward what vocabulary we are interested in learning. When we began, she asked what words we already knew. At this point, our vocabulary consists of about 3 words - igen (yes), nem (no), and kosonom (thank you). We have a long way to go!

Our lesson began with the ABC's. There are 44 letters in the Hungarian alphabet. Our brains quickly were on overload as we tried to learn the letters and their sounds. We have to train our brains to remember that "s" makes the sh sound and "j" makes the y sound. "C" makes the s sound and "cs" makes the ch sound. Our eyes were pretty glazed over after an hour! We did learn a few new words and I am practicing them this week. If we can learn a little bit each week, we will be far better off than we are now!

Since she will gear the lessons to what we want to learn, we think we'll be providing examples of things we will find useful. For example, next week I plan to show her some McDonald's coupons we have. If we went to McDonald's, I assume ordering at the drive-thru would be quite challenging. Not that we eat there, of course.....