We have been wrestling with the Hungarian language for a long time now. First there were the three Calvin College semesters in Budapest that Jeff directed, and I came along on. For each of these semesters we sat in a basic survival Hungarian class which the Calvin students took and tried to absorb as much as we could from the one-and-only Kati Fügedi’s lessons. That was especially challenging for Jeff because those lessons took place at the beginning of the semester when many other organizational details were on his To-Do list, many or all of them to be done in unfamiliar systems and organizations.
But we tried, and learned enough to sometimes communicate simple requests and thoughts, even if not perfectly. I’ll never forget the sense of accomplishment I felt in fall of 2011 when I said to the lady at the cheese stand in the market, “Negyed kilo sajtot kérek,” and we completed the whole transaction in Hungarian. I asked for a quarter kilogram of cheese – I don’t remember the kind of cheese anymore.
And we tried other learning supplements. We borrowed Pimsleur Hungarian language CDs from the library and later bought a set of them. (We still had a way to listen to CDs then.) By the time we were thinking about the 2019 semester, there were now such things as apps. We spent many hours trying to figure out Hungarian in DuoLingo. It was kind of like trying to learn how to use a computer with no instructions, just trial and error.
When we were seriously contemplating a move to Budapest with Resonate Global Mission as a career change for Jeff, the Covid-19 pandemic changed the world as we knew it. We learned that a Hungarian friend who teaches Hungarian as a second language was offering online lessons. So we signed up for classes once a week. It was great having one-on-two attention to our learning needs, and we started learning things we never had before. Still, it was hard to make time to do homework and practice enough to internalize much of it.
Then, thanks to God and many of you, we reached the point in this faith journey (beginning? Middle? End? End and beginning? There are so many ways of looking at it!) when we were able to move to Budapest. Since shortly after our arrival, we have been taking lessons multiple time a week. Still online, with a new teacher, and now 5 days/week, Monday-Friday. There are some concepts we are starting to really understand and “get”. We’re surrounded by Hungarian language in print and voice. We understand more and can say more than we ever have before.
And yet… we’re still just at the beginning. Any normally developing Hungarian 3-year-old can say and understand more than we can – probably even 2-year-olds! It’s humbling. We’ve been here before. In our mid-20s we spent a year in Mexico and learned to speak Spanish (with much younger brains, but still past optimal language-learning age). And we remember that we will feel like children in this language for a long, long time. Maybe always. Hungarian is much harder for English speakers to learn than Spanish. It’s hard for most speakers of anything other than Hungarian!
Frankly, I don’t enjoy feeling like a child, even though I am a teacher by training and have great respect and love for children. By and large, being a child is not a position of power in the world. It’s not a comfortable place to be. But it is a position of truth. Children know they don’t know everything, and while they are wildly curious learning machines, they don’t pretend they know it all, even to themselves. While they’re proud of what they learn to do, they don’t think they’ve finished and have nothing else to learn.
And really, even if we were to completely master Hungarian, wouldn’t all those things that children know of themselves still be true of us? Weren’t they already true of us in Michigan where we felt comfortable in our “adult-ness” and our positions of relative power? So maybe, being beginning language learners is just helping us be aware of who we always are as humans: beginners on the journey of learning, no matter how long we’ve been traveling.
