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UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES)

Debrecen, Hungary

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Hungarian Level 4 Advanced

Course description: Level 4 is for those who have successfully completed the Level 3 Hungarian Evening Course or a similar course and/or have developed a sound knowledge of the language through extensive visits to the Hungary, personal relationships, or working with the language. The course runs over three ten-week terms and each session is two hours long. Linguistic and cultural awareness is reinforced through continuous revision and grammar is consolidated as an integral part of texts, short films, and topics covered on the course. On completion of the course students should be able to get by in Hungarian-speaking environments, converse reasonably fluently with native speakers, and to retrieve information from a wide range of authentic materials. The course includes all four skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. The course will cover the following:

Topics:

  • Hungarian culture and society through text, film, and music
  • Hungary in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the EU
  • Hungarian-British relations past and present
  • key events of Hungarian history
  • Budapest and Hungary all year around: festivals and festivities
  • talking about the weather
  • environmental protection and nature reserves
  • conflicting views and political conflict: past and present
  • trends and canon in Hungarian literature

Functions:

  • reading, analysing, and summarising authentic texts
  • extracting and presenting information from written sources or visual material
  • reporting on events and matters of public interest
  • writing reports and preparing presentations
  • negotiating and discussing various points of views
  • commenting, debating, criticising written material, news, and events
  • speculating, making assumptions
  • retrieving and collating information from a variety of authentic sources and media
  • ‘reading between the lines’: detecting non-explicit content in texts

Grammar:

  • possession revisited 1: possessive constructions and chains in discontinuous noun phrases
  • possession revisited 2: the habeo construction and alienable and unalienable possession
  • verbal prefixes and aspect revisited; refining the use of verbal prefixes
  • derivational noun and verb suffixes, compounding
  • the imperative-subjunctive in a variety of functions: overview
  • the past, present, and adverbial participles
  • types of complex noun phrases with participial modifiers
  • complex sentences and types of relative clauses: overview
  • idiomatic expressions and proverbs

Learning resources:

  • Dr M. Kovácsi, Itt magyarul beszélnek, Vol. 3 and 4., Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó Zrt., Budapest, 1993, 2001.
  • G. Kiss, I. Molnár, Jó szórakozást magyarul! Fun Reading Exercises / Olvasókönyv magyarul tanulóknak, Bp: Molilla Könyv, 2009.
  • Eszter Tarsoly, Reading Strategies: a Hungarian Graded Reader for Post-graduate Students, ePublication in the CEELBAS Language Repository, UCL/SSEES, 2011.
  • The more advanced volumes of the Hungarolingua series, e.g. Nem csak novellák, Szemezgető, Fülelő;
  • Sz. Szita, T. Görbe, Gyakorló magyar nyelvtan / A Practical Hungarian Grammar, Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.
  • Various authentic sources: works of Hungarian literature, daily press, media.

General Information