A Hungarian schoolboy.

By 1990, it was no longer compulsory to learn Russian in Hungary. Students celebrated, no longer forced to learn the “language of oppression.” But fast-forward to 2009, and Hungary may be facing a foreign language gap — a 2004 study showed fewer Hungarians spoke second languages than almost any other country in Europe, except Britain. 

Eva S. Balogh is a Hungarian academic and blogger who writes at “Hungarian Spectrum” about the state of language education in her country. 

Learning a language in Hungary

The teaching of foreign languages in Hungarian schools is bad. Very, very bad. As far back as I can remember it was bad. Although my father in the early part of the twentieth century managed to learn German and French quite well in gymnasium, by the time I got to gymnasium it was a hopeless proposition.

Let me recount my own tortuous linguistic journey. Aside from being enrolled in a so-called German-language kindergarten where we learned no German whatsoever, I started studying French in grade five. [...] Although the parochial school I attended was run by a French order (Notre Dame), out of the four parallel classes they taught German in three and French in only one.

Our French teacher by Hungarian standards wasn’t even half bad. The fact that she was a nun stood her in good stead in mastering a foreign language. Because she majored in French she was sent by the order to a French university for a couple of years. So she could at least speak the language tolerably well. However, the class focused on reading and writing, with virtually no conversation. So after three years of French I switched to Russian. That was an interesting experience. I don’t think our teacher knew more Russian than we did. I.e. zero. She was at best a couple of lessons ahead of us. Not surprisingly we learned practically nothing by the end of the year.

[...]With the change of regime Russian was no longer a compulsory language. So students rushed to English, German, and French classes. But who were their teachers? The former Russian teachers who tried to learn English, German, or French with the same poor results as the German and French teachers who had earlier tried to learn Russian.

Today, aside from the lack of experienced teachers, the problem seems to be the same as in earlier times. Students don’t learn to communicate in a foreign language; they can neither speak nor comprehend. They are in the same boat as the Hungarian students who were trying to converse with the Russian soldiers in 1956.

Some people have tried to explain Hungarian deficiencies in learning a foreign language by pointing out that Hungarian is not an Indo-European language and therefore Hungarian speakers find it harder to learn a western language. This is hogwash. Finns manage; the percentage of Finns speaking one or two foreign languages is among the highest in Europe. Moreover, Hungarians find it easier to learn a western language than to learn Finnish whose grammatical structure is very similar to Hungarian. 

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jo Peattie under a Creative Commons license.

Gypsy musicians in Budapest.

Hungary has one of the largest Roma communities in eastern Europe. Gypsies make up 5 to 7 percent of the country’s 10 million people.

But the Roma often face hardship and prejudice, and many live in poverty. Even Albert Pasztor, the chief of police in Hungary’s third largest city, stated last year that “gypsy and Hungarian culture cannot coexist without conflict.”

Eva S. Balogh is a Hungarian academic and blogger who writes at “Hungarian Spectrum” about how gypsies have fared under different Hungarian governments over the past half-century, and discusses how they might fit in with Hungarian society today.

Hungarian Gypsies in the Kádár regime and since

It wasn’t too many years ago that Gypsies still led a nomadic life. I was a very small child, perhaps four years old and not very brave, when my father stopped the car in the Mecsek Mountains above Pécs in order to meet a large Gypsy family living in tents in the woods right off the highway. I remember that I wasn’t too thrilled: it was a very strange world only a few kilometers from the city. But even in the summer of 1956 when three of my classmates and I were walking through the mountains on a marked path, out of the blue on both sides of the path a very large Gypsy family was camping. Or perhaps several.

Today these people are settled, three quarters of them in very small villages mostly in Northern Hungary and in Southern Transdanubia, especially in Baranya country, south of Pécs, close to the Croatian-Hungarian border.

Some of these villages were utterly transformed in the last fifty years or so. They are now inhabited almost entirely by Gypsies. Here is one example. I’m somewhat familiar with the village of Old. According to the 1910 census Old had a population of 502 out of which most likely the number of Gypsies was 59. In the 1910 census Gypsies were not specifically designated as such but were put under the rubric of “Others.” Today the village has a population of 370 or so and according to the latest reports (an article in Dunántúli Napló) the whole population of the village is Roma.

How did this happen? I remember visiting the village as a twelve-year-old and by then, during the Rákosi regime, the Gypsies who lived outside of the village were forcibly settled in the houses of better-off villagers. To this day, I remember a rather odd conversation with a middle aged man who wanted to know whether my family would perhaps be interested in hiring his daughter. He explained to me how useful she would be for us: among other things she could bring water from the well!

I’m relating this so that you would understand that sixty years ago some Gypsies were that unfamiliar with the modern world. Sure, there were the elegant Gypsies who played music in practically every restaurant. But today even that opportunity is pretty well closed. There are very few restaurants with live music, and especially not Gypsy music. So starting with the Rákosi regime and continuing under the Kádár regime the nomadic Gypsies were settled, mostly in villages.

[...]More and more people say that Gypsies under the age of thirty-five should be compelled to finish at least eight grades and learn a trade. Otherwise there is no hope for improvement in the future. But what is their incentive?

My preliminary, admittedly feeble thoughts go along the following lines. Find some things that Gypsies love to do and start competitions. And promote them. Basically, make Gypsies people the rest of the Hungarian population can root for. And as the top prize award not only money but an advertising spot. Create a Magic Johnson or a Tiger Woods. However primitive this suggestion, the idea behind it is to have Hungarians start to accept their Roma brethren, even occasionally cheer for them. If one can get to this level, then the government can start to impose some anti-discrimination legislation without a crippling pushback from the population.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user abac077 under a Creative Commons license.

A gas station in Budapest.

Russia’s dispute with Ukraine over gas prices has impacted other European nations whose gas shipments pass through Ukraine. Hungarian imports from Russia were down more than 20 percent on Tuesday, but the country still has more gas than others cut off in the dispute — Hungary plans to deliver gas to Serbia, which has no gas reserves.

Gazprom, a state-controlled Russian energy company and the world’s largest producer of natural gas, reduced gas supplies to Ukraine after accusing the country of stealing 65.3 million cubic meters of gas since Jan. 1.

Eva S. Balogh is a Hungarian academic and blogger who writes at “Hungarian Spectrum” about her country’s position in the gas dispute. 

Crisis after crisis: now it is gas

There is a Hungarian slang expression: “there is gas” (gáz van). It means there is big trouble. The big trouble now is that there is no gas. That is, there is no gas coming from Russia via Ukraine. Of course, the trouble would be greater if Hungary didn’t have enough reserves to survive for at least two more months. Other countries–Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Serbia, for example–are in much bigger trouble because they have practically no reserves. Serbia already turned to Hungary yesterday for help. The initial Hungarian answer was negative, but by today the Hungarian government decided that after all it could spare a couple of billion m³ of gas because yesterday Hungarian consumption was lower than expected. Also Hungary has some natural gas of its own and a smaller amount reaches the country from Austria as well. Thus while Bulgaria and Slovakia are entirely dependent on Russian gas, Hungary relies on Russian gas for somewhere between 50% and 75% of its needs. Today, for example, 4 billion m³ gas arrived from Austria. The problem is that countries in Eastern Europe that depend on Russian gas can’t really help each other because there are no pipelines between Romania and Bulgaria, or Hungary and Slovakia, or Romania and Hungary.

No one knows what the real situation is between the warring business partners, Russia and Ukraine. If one can believe the Russian ambassador to Hungary, there are four “faucets” that can be turned on or off. Three of these were shut off by Ukraine yesterday morning and only then did Russia move to shut off the one remaining “faucet.” The Ukrainians’ version of events, not surprisingly, is different. They claim that they would be most willing to send on any natural gas that arrives in their pipelines. But there is none. The Russians have shut off the flow of gas.

Then there are the two entirely different interpretations of the Russian-Ukrainian feud. There are those who claim that it is simply a business quarrel while others think that it is fundamentally a political issue. Russia is putting economic pressure on Ukraine to keep it within the fold. Ukraine, on the other hand, is looking westward; it wants to belong to NATO and eventually to the European Union. A Hungarian political scientist currently in Kiev views the crisis solely in political terms, a manifestation of Russia’s imperial aspirations. Even the Russian ambassador to Hungary admitted that Russia is unhappy with Ukrainian political ambitions. I’m inclined to think that Russia’s dispute with Ukraine is not solely economic. Russia’s loss of Ukraine must still be hard to swallow. After all, with the exception of a very brief period after World War I when Ukraine became independent, it was an integral part of Russia for over three centuries. Also there is a huge Russian population within Ukraine’s borders.

To read more, see the original post.

The views expressed by contributing bloggers do not reflect the views of Worldfocus or its partners.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user zsoolt under a Creative Commons license.