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Course description: Level 4 is for those who have successfully completed the Level 4 Hungarian Evening Course or a similar course and/or have developed an excellent knowledge of the language through working with Hungarian, or through living in a partly Hungarian-speaking environment. The course runs over three ten-week terms and each session is two hours long. The aim of the course is to help fluent speakers of Hungarian to maintain and extend their knowledge of the language, as well as to enhance their literacy and translation skills, and cultural awareness. The course includes all four skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. The course will cover the following:
Topics:
- key works of Hungarian literature: excerpts or whole works
- writing a reader’s diary
- Hungarian theatre and cinema: iconic places and personalities
- cultural and linguistic cross-roads: Hungary and Hungarian (a history of the Carpathian basin and of Hungarian)
- two key trends in Hungarian political thought and literature: the urbanist-peasantist debate
- spaces of public life in Budapest: train stations, baths, and coffee-houses
- Hungarian in minority context and minorities in Hungary
- topics chosen according to students’ specialised interest
Functions:
- understanding dialectal and societal variation in Hungarian: slang, contact varieties, and archaic forms of expression;
- analysing, and responding to, reviews and criticism
- writing reviews and summaries
- extracting and presenting information from written sources or visual material
- reporting on events and matters of public interest
- commenting, negotiating, and preparing presentations
- ‘reading between the lines’: detecting non-explicit content in texts
- practising advanced translation from and into Hungarian
Grammar:
- regional dialects, Hungarian in contact with other languages
- highlights from the history of Hungarian
- Hungarian in Slovakia, Serbia, and Romania
- Romanian (Boyash) and Romani in Hungary
- early texts and first attestations of Hungarian
- historical past and texts from the 19th century
- once upon a time without vowel harmony…
- complex possessive and participial noun phrases
Learning resources:
- as at Level 4 and the teachers’ and the students’ own material
- various authentic sources: works of Hungarian literature, daily press, media
- recordings of dialects and language varieties
- Hungarian films and excerpts from theatre shows.