Hunglish.hu lets you search subtitles and other material in Hungarian and/or English, to find the translation you're looking for. Great to find the translation of natural, everyday expressions, in context (this is critical.)

Tip: use double quotes around your queries for more specific results.

(Linguee.hu serves a similar purpose, but I prefer Hunglish.hu for Hungarian.)

To master even basic Hungarian, you need to learn to inflect words. How do you decline this noun? Say, how do you form the plural? Does it take -nek or -nak? How do you form the possessive? And how do you conjugate this verb? What are its definite and indefinite forms? Subjunctive? etc.

To this end, Alaktani táblázatok offers inflection tables: type in any word in its dictionary form to find its declension or conjugation. (Wiktionary also offers inflection tables, though maybe not as many – see below.)

This is not super fun to do, but checking the inflections of any word you have doubts about will make your Hungarian much better.

en.wiktionary.org and hu.wiktionary.org are possibly the most complete Hungarian dictionaries available online for free. What's great about it is that translations are clearly organized by meaning. It also often includes audio and a phonemic transcription.

On Android, this Hungarian dictionary by TinyAppWorks is my favorite. It's simple and without clutter. It keeps a history of the last 128 words you looked up, which makes it convenient to review words in your spare time (say, while you wait for the bus or whatever.)

💡 Tip: search in Hungarian as much as possible to force yourself to use the language – I do this with words I don't recall exactly, or right after learning a new word.

Wiktionary is nice, but it lacks too much data in Hungarian and is based on volunteer work, often making it hard to tell if something is correct. This is where Szotar.net comes in: it offers electronic versions of paper dictionaries published by Akadémiai Kiadó, so you can trust their content is accurate. (Akadémiai Kiadó offers arguably the best bilingual dictionaries.)

The site offers a basic free dictionary, a 2-hour free trial for any of their dictionaries, and many dictionaries. A one-year subscription to Angol szótárcsomag will cost you 5490 Ft.

It's not perfect (too few example sentences to my liking) and it can be hard to find the meaning you're looking for.

But, even then, it's a great resource and the only pro dictionary I know of on the computer. In short, if you need a professional Hungarian dictionary, it's either this or their paper dictionaries.

Yandex Translate is the best machine translation for Hungarian (with 81% accuracy vs. 65% for Amazon and only 42% for Google in our tests) So not perfect, but still the best.

If you want to learn Hungarian faster, it's simple: you need to practice more often! And so having tools that save you time will help.

Alfred (Mac only) is a great utility to perform a quick search on a website of your choosing. In short: I just press ⌘ Space from anywhere on my computer, and then type in a short command to launch one of many different searches. For example:

Because it makes it fast & easy for me to look things up, I do it more often and practice more.

(An alternative to Alfred for Windows is Wox.)

To write in Hungarian on the computer, I like using Sublime Text 3 + a Hungarian spellchecker.

To type in Hungarian, I use the so-called U.S. International keyboard layout available on both Mac and Windows alike. But I had to customize it a bit to get all of the Hungarian letters. In short, with this method, I type:

Books and sites are all nice and dandy, but languages are meant to be used with people! We need feedback to learn from our mistakes. This is where I get help with my Hungarian:

I hope you liked this first article and – most importantly – that you found it helpful! If you'd like me to cover a specific topic in an upcoming article, please leave a comment here.

Jó tanulást kívánok!