Oh szív! Nyugodj

Most of the people who usually take up my time are not around right now, so I'm spamming the blog. I thought it was about time I posted something related to Hungarian, and I also wanted to "keep" this particular video that my Hungarian language partner showed me: Óh szív Nyugodj, a poem by József Attila, "sung" by Ágnes Vanilla.

Fegyverben réved fönn a téli ég,
kemény a menny és vándor a vidék,
halkul a hó, megáll az elmenő,
lehellete a lobbant keszkenő.

Hol is vagyok? Egy szalmaszál nagyon
helyezkedik a csontozott uton;
kis, száraz nemzet; izgágán szuszog,
zuzódik, zizzen, izzad és buzog.

De fönn a hegyen ágyat bont a köd,
mint egykor melléd: mellé leülök.
Bajos szél jaját csendben hallgatom,
csak hulló hajam repes vállamon.

Óh szív! nyugodj! Vad boróka hegyén
szerelem szólal, incseleg felém,
pirkadó madár, karcsu, koronás,
de áttetsző, mint minden látomás.

Fegyverben réved fönn a téli ég,
kemény a menny és vándor a vidék,
halkul a hó, megáll az elmenő,
lehellete a lobbant keszkenő.

Hol is vagyok? Egy szalmaszál nagyon
helyezkedik a csontozott uton;
kis, száraz nemzet; izgágán szuszog,
zuzódik, zizzen, izzad és buzog.

De fönn a hegyen ágyat bont a köd,
mint egykor melléd: mellé leülök.
Bajos szél jaját csendben hallgatom,
csak hulló hajam repes vállamon.

Óh szív! nyugodj! Vad boróka hegyén
szerelem szólal, incseleg felém,
pirkadó madár, karcsu, koronás,
de áttetsző, mint minden látomás.

And there was much rejoicing...

It happened. I got a Hungarian text that I can actually read, look up some words per sentence and understand without too much trouble. All thanks to my Tandem partner! It's even a funny text. An extract for the Hungarians (from Bezzeg az én időmben by Fehér Klára):

Hálóingben nem lehet iskolába menni.

Nem. Akárhogy nézem, nem lehet.

Esetleg levágnék az aljából egy fél métert, akkor nem lógna ki a szoknyából. Múltkor, amikor nem volt időm rendesen megfésülködni, a hajamból is lekanyarítottam a kimaradt fürtöt. Igaz, hogy másnap a fésülködésnél éppen ez a hajcsomó hiányzott... Nehéz az élet. Még egyszer körül kell néznem a lakásban.

A konyhában, a ruhaszárító kötélen két árva zsebkendő lóg. Igaz, tiszta zsebkendőm sincs. De ezek még vizesek. A fürdőszobában, no persze, a fürdőszobában, a kádban, mosóporba áztatva ott vannak a kombinék és - engedelmet kérek - a bugyik, amiket este könnyelműen én magam hajigáltam bele.

And speaking of languages, I'm toying with the idea of writing in Russian here. Not sure if it's a good idea, if I should keep it English (with the extremely occasional French) or turn it more multilingual. Time will tell. I'll go French first, anyway.

2011 - The year people started taking me serious?

I kind of stopped posting simply because I ran out of time. Just as I predicted, keeping up with the one book per week thing is proving increasingly challenging, but I haven't failed yet. My biggest issue is that I want to read in Russian, and that slows me down considerably. Starting Любовь Фрау Клейст is strategically more or less retarded, but I do need to read some more Russian now.


I was speaking to a friend the other day, and he mentioned going completely off a language after having spent some time in the country speaking it. I wonder if that's what happened to me with Russian. Before going to Russia, I read all the time. I've hardly read anything since coming back. That's about to change now though! And I could perhaps just skim through a small Russian book and perhaps make it in a week, but now I'm reading because I want to increase my vocabulary. The translation class at university does not offer me any new vocabulary, and I want to push further ahead into the region of "wtf you know that word!?"-vocabulary.


And as for Russian, I was also at a mini Russian movie night the other day with three friends. We drank the Hungarian national alcohol Unicum (and I was not the one who brought it!!), ate Norwegian carrot cake and watched the brilliant and absolutely absurd movie Город Зеро.


If you see it somewhere, buy it.

I kind of feel like I'm filling up my quota of things Russian. I just have to increase my expertise in some other areas as well, notably in linguistics... Ьy linguistics vocabulary is sorely lacking, and I think it would be a wise investment on my behalf to perhaps dedicate this summer to linguistics self-study. Getting a Master's degree in Russian language isn't the most lucrative thing to do, and our student advisor (a very helpful Russian lady) always mentions how the alternative of our program (career wise) is really a better idea: Russian area studies. There are actually some jobs attached to that one, and you can't do a thing just knowing Russian - there are plenty of Russians in Norway who do that. Getting a Master's in Russian language is, in my opinion, rather pointless unless you do it brilliantly. My dream is to continue working at university, to get a Ph.D. and then just go from there. So I was very pleased when our student advisor told me this was what I was supposed to do based on my grades, without me mentioning my plans to her.

If you plan on going deep into language, you have to know your linguistics. And I'm quite curious to see how this may accelerate my language learning. I already see how being very familiar with some changes in Indo-European languages can be greatly helpful in acquiring vocabulary. The same words really are everywhere, they are just hard to spot unless you can track their development. Naturally, this particular bit doesn't help me at all with Hungarian :-) And I am actually back on track with that one, speaking it twice a week and everything with my new language partner from Hungary. If things go according to plan this weekend, I will even be opening up Üvöltő szelek. For the third time, in a third language.

But as usual I have lots of plans, lots of great ideas. I also have lots of work. Not only did I have to take an extra class outside of my full-time studies this term, but I also got a job as a translator. The job wasn't supposed to take all that long, but I think they greatly underestimated how much text there actually is. Yesterday, I got registered as an interpreter for an interpreting business in Oslo as well. So it does actually look like I'm finally getting a bit of experience to make up for my lacking formal translation/interpreting qualifications.

Well, I have an essay on linguistic agreement to write since we go to Kiel in Germany on Monday. But before I leave, I wanted to share two links for the truly nerdy.

http://www.ruscorpora.ru/ - The National Corpus of the Russian Language - perfect when you're searching for occurrences of words, grammatical features, exceptions, anything.

Vasmer's etymological dictionary of the Russian language - find out where all the words come from! Our Slavic language history teacher teacher told us this was a book (actually, four books) any serious student of Russian should have. But hey, it's online!

Carrying a Secret in My Heart.

I just finished reading Carrying a Secret in My Heart, and thought I should post some quotes here. I always enjoy saving quotes, because reading them one year later is always a fun reminder of what I liked about a certain book. However, I have realized that when I write down quotes on old-fashioned pieces of paper I just lose them ;)

I chose a couple of quotes from the chapter dealing with the 1956 revolutionaries' children's opinions of their father's actions and of the return from prison. All of the interviewed children have fathers that were either thrown in prison as a consequence of their participation in the events or by being there by accident, or who were executed. The women who participated were either too young to have children or too old, and very few were executed.

"I cannot feed proud about it because such pride involves spending 10 or 15 years in prison for the ideal of 1956 and getting away with it. But what can I say? I lost my father, and my mother had to suffer twice as much as other women. That's really something to be proud of!" (Ferenc Z.)

"After I learned that my father had been executed I was really ashamed. If he had been executed he must have committed some horrendous crime. If someone is given a sentence like that, he must be guilty or something terrible. Even later on I didn't see him as a hero or as someone who had changed history, but as someone who had abandoned his family." (Katalin Földesi)

"There was a photograph of my father on the desk, but it only showed his face. And when my grandmother said that if daddy came home he would teach me to ride a bicycle and to swim I suddenly burst out crying: 'How will he play with me when he hasn't got any legs?'" (Krisztina Lukách)

"When we went on holiday I spent the whole time sitting on a tree waiting for my father. I became a past master at waiting. But no one could tell me when he would come back. Nor did they realize that they should have told me that we would be informed in advance when he was coming back. They should have said something at least to stop me being permanently on the lookout for him." (Zsuzsa Mérei)

"I remember being afraid when we talked about him coming home. I was apprehensive, partly because we got along so well at home and partly because I have come across many bad fathers. Another reason was that in the end I had no idea what kind of person daddy was. Of course, mom always loved talking about him and it was clear that she loved him a great deal and wanted him home. But in reality I still didn't know what kind of man he was. I was afraid that someone would somehow upset my world. Mom, for example, never smacked me. As far as I knew fathers smacked their children. I was afraid that a man would come who would start hitting me. But it soon turned out that he was a really nice bloke." (Péter Zsámboki)

"My mom's nerves gave out completely. She cried all the time and it was very hard for us. Then she got all kinds of illnesses and had some serious operations. The doctor said it was all due to her nerves. She suffered a great deal. She was always afraid and always sick and we were always having to run to the phone to call the doctor. On many occasions when mom was in hospital we three children were left alone and I had to look after the little ones. Then I got an ulcer and I was taken to hospital several times." (Jószef Andi)

Rekindling dead interest.

What are you supposed to do when you fall off the motivational wagon? Or when you just get out of the habit of doing something? Up until now, this hadn't happened to me in a very long time because I have always had rather strict habits, but three months of breaking those habits had certain effects. So what to do?

The other day I had a friend over for a visit. She is very interested in things connected to politics and knows more than the average person about many odd countries, so I asked her how she goes about to acquire this knowledge. It's not really obvious (besides Wikipedia) to know where to start when you all of a sudden want to read up on... Turkmenistan. She said that along with factual texts and books, she also explores literary productions from the country in question in order to get more of a feel for things. Of course, this is a person who probably reads faster than anyone I know, and when you do that, this approach is not that time-consuming, but as long as you have free time what's the problem?

It is not the first time this idea strikes me, but it kind of felt like a revelation to be reminded of it. Novels are an excellent way to get loosely acquainted with history and this is one of those instances when I think you should not underestimate the use of literature (you know all those people who ask what good literature can do?). When you read a fictional book about something it usually gets an emotional hold on you, more than any nonfictional book ever could, and when you combine it with hard facts from other sources, I think your chances of remembering things increases dramatically.

Now, I belong to that group of people who learn languages and who also want to learn things about the country the language is spoken in and its culture. For a long time, I have been wanting to read up on Hungarian history. Now that I can't really make myself study Hungarian, I thought that perhaps by reading about Hungary I could trigger the spark of motivation. At the same time, I'm studying democracy at University, so why not combine all three? Yesterday I found the book Carrying a Secret in My Heart, dealing with recollections from the children of the revolutionaries of 1956 in Hungary. If all goes according to plan, I'm going to follow this book up with another one on the development of democracy in Poland and Hungary, entitled From Elections to Democracy: Building Accountable Government in Hungary and Poland. Hungary is an extremely interesting country at the moment, but sadly I have extremely poor knowledge of what is actually going on there and the historical explanations to it. But it's not like you have to go to school to get educated! At University you get a diploma, study you can do at home ;)

Hungarian resources.

This here is mostly a motivational post for myself (if there is such a thing as a book fetishist, I'm one of them) since I don't think very many of the people who read my blog are interested in Hungarian. It's a resource post and I will discuss the materials have for Hungarian; what books are use and what books I don't use. It may be of general interest as well, even if you are not interested in Hungarian.

Let's start with vocabulary. I visited Hungary, or Budapest that is, in the summer of 2008, and before that I had never really thought about studying Hungarian. It kind of felt like too much of an opportunity to miss to not buy materials while I was there though, and once having bought these books, I just had to start studying it. I bought the dictionaries, the big ones and a small one (and then before leaving Budapest, the friend of my boyfriend, who was studying medicine in Budapest, gave me the "Say It in Hungarian" and another mini dictionary). I also bought the flashcards and the dictionary with pictures, but I haven't used these much. I used the flashcards in the beginning, but then I switched to using Anki.


Of course, you need some grammar! I only bought the PONS books in Hungary, and oh how I regret not buying a verb book with full declension of verbs. It would really be useful to have a "500 Hungarian verbs" kind of book. There is the site HVC, but in order to use that one, you have to be sure you are using the correct verb stem. I got my Assimil from a friend in France, and I think I did 40 or 60 or so (no idea really :P) lessons in it, but the book kind of annoyed me sometimes (it's quite misogynic) and as usual, I got bored with it... right now I'm using an all Hungarian book called Lépésenként magyarul, which I only have as a PDF. I prefer this book, but I use it rather slowly, since I work with many other things besides workbooks.

I just got my blue Hungarian grammar book the other day, and I really love it. I am going to index it completely and read it from page 1... to 300 and something. I have a big fat book of Russian grammar as well, but it has never really tempted me that much to lay down in bed and flip through it. Just no fun, and that grammar book is... actually rather boring. I really like this Routledge one though, I think it's very nicely made and it's pleasant to read.

The book "Hungarian verbs and essentials of grammar" was just a book I bought because it was cheap, and because I couldn't find anything else that seemed to deal with verbs specifically. It's really rather useless though, it's way too shallow. It could be useful as just a quick reference, but if you're going to buy a book anyway, go for the blue one.

By the way, I really like how it says on the PONS books "comprehensive and user friendly" and "easy" while the guy on the cover is hiding on every book :D I haven't used the noun-declension tables book yet, it's actually rather intimidating and so far I have managed without it. I figure it may become useful when I get better at Hungarian though.

I am dreaming of getting the book Gyakorló magyar because it has exercises in it (that kind of stuff is difficult to find for Hungarian), and overall I like the site Magyaróra, which is where it comes from. With a bit of luck, my colleague will be able to find it when he goes to Budapest in a couple of weeks.

Naturally, I had to buy some literature while in Hungary! Since I didn't know anything at all about Hungarian literature back then, I bought stuff that I recognized, translations of works I had previously read. That's why there is some Jane Austen and Emily Brontë in there :-) I also bought the Montgomery book, because I thought it would be a nice steppingstone between children's literature and full-grown adult literature, but actually it's very difficult. I am also reading Jane Eyre in Hungarian, but for that one I am cheating. I only have it as a text document, but fortunately, it's a dual language text, Hungarian and English. I'm not sure how much I have read so far, but quite a couple of pages and I really like it, plus I already know the story. I have started reading Ciróka and Anne az élet iskolájaban, but as I mentioned, the second one is very difficult. Én es a fiam is actually a Swedish book that I found in the online catalog of a secondhand bookshop in my hometown. I sent my mother there to buy it, and then she sent it to me. The author, Sara Lidman, is from the same place as my grandmother (in the depths of Lapland), and she writes rather weird books sometimes. Wrote. She's dead now.


Buying books in Hungary was rather funny, because everything was so cheap. When I came to pay, the cashier seemed quite embarrassed to tell me the total sum and was a bit anxious about my bank card and if it would work out and so on. Little did she know that what I paid for all of the books was more or less the equal of what I would have paid for the dictionaries alone in Norway!

Besides from these books, I also use a couple of other resources. I haven't used the FSI easy reader in a long time now, but it's a very good resource and the text are actually very good. I am also going to try to read more news articles now, in order to acquire some "useful" vocabulary. Lang-8 is, as usual, perhaps my most important resource, together with Anki.

So that's it. I have probably forgotten about something, I usually do, but I do like having an overview of the stuff I have, or else I end up never using it because the books just disappear among the several hundreds I have in my bookshelves. Now, I'm going to get back to lesson six of Lépésenként magyarul.

Sörözni.

I have a couple (or 10) of these in the fridge. Happiness.

There is this one verb that I always forget to use in Hungarian, even though it's absolutely brilliant and should be used all the time. I tend to write "blablabla sört inni" (literally "beer to drink") and then someone corrects that to "sörözni". And how cool is that? A verb that actually means "to drink beer" (even though I'm not 100% certain I understand the nuances of this word). I was thinking a bit about how this would turn out in other languages. In Swedish I guess we would arrive at "öla" (öl being beer), which at least to me sounds very funny. Conjugated in the first person that would be "jag ölar". It's so ugly I think I must start using it. We do have a specific verb that is used together with drinking alcohol, when you're kind of sitting around drinking something, and that's "pimpla", which is also the word for "ice fishing". I like it though - "Pimpla öl". Still, it's composed of two words.

In English it would be... to beer? I beer. Hmm, that doesn't really work out that well, does it? French, bièrer - je bière. Same problem there! Obviously, the productive patterns of those two languages aren't always that practical.

I think I'm going to öla tonight, because tomorrow is a day off. The summer, I hope I will be doing lots of ölning. I ölade a bit yesterday, so I know that the öl I have is very tasty.

Do you know of any other language that has a particular verb for beer drinking?

Tavasszal minden felébred téli álmából.

(In spring, everything wakes up from its winter sleep (hibernation).)

The other day I was trying my luck with Anne az élet iskolájában, but it was a bit tiresome. I am really not able to read a real text in Hungarian yet, but I will keep trying. As a warm-up, I worked with the third text from the FSI Easy Reader today, and it made me fall in love with Hungarian all over again. The overly enthusiastic voice of the woman on the recording almost took away part of the beauty of it, but after I had listened to her a couple of times, I got used to it. When I'm looking up things in the dictionary in Hungarian, I am often struck by how beautiful words are, or how different, harmonic, symmetric they are. This never happens with Russian. Russian words are just Russian. Hungarian words are small wonders all on their own.

How about ibolya (Violet)? For some reason, I always enjoy learning the names of flowers or trees in foreign languages, and I probably know more names for trees in Russian than in French or perhaps even English. Another word that struck me was zümmög, in méhek zümmögnek (the bees are humming). Kizöldülni (come into leaf, become green), megsárgulni (turn yellow). Perfectly logical and lovely words, even though they may not be extremely useful.

Az erdei utak szélén feltűnik a hóvirág, majd a szerény ibolya. Méhek zümmögnek, pillangók röpködnek. Lassan csupa virág, csupa illat lesz minden. A tavasz a legszebb évszak.

(My attempt at a translation: Along the edges of the forest roads snow flowers appear, then the modest violet. The bees are humming, the butterflies are flying around. Slowly everything becomes a pure flower, a pure fragrance. Spring is the most beautiful season.)

To continue my Hungarian afternoon, I thought I would start making my Hungarian verb book.

Я свободна!

I have no more exams, I am free for quite a long time, and naturally I should make as good use as possible of that time. I have many plans, probably way too many. As usual.

Yesterday I started reading another Norwegian book, or rather a book in Norwegian, Døren by Magda Szabó. The original is Hungarian, and I thought I should get some more exposure to Hungarian literature without necessarily waiting to read it in Hungarian. I very recently finished Jeg skal vise dere frykten by Nikolaj Frobenius, which I liked, but I was not absolutely thrilled about it. I fell in love with this new book from the first couple of pages though, so all is looking good.

But there are more books, there always are.

I am also going to start reading Russland og russere, Russia and Russians, a book about... well it's rather obvious. I am very much looking forward to it, since I usually like these kinds of books very much. Shortly I will make a post on books on culture that I have found very useful. It's also in Norwegian, which is great since this gives me increased literary Norwegian influence.

Furthermore, I am taking a class on the history of nationalism this spring at a Swedish University, and I plan to at least skim through the two books I have ordered for it. There are three books on the curriculum, but the third one was sold out, which is a bit troublesome. Swedish books! Or at least one of them was Swedish...

Russian then? Of course, there's always a Russian book! I started reading Dostoyevsky's Бедные Люди (Poor Folks) the day before yesterday. It's very short; I have already read 13% of it on my Kindle, and I am looking forward to reading the rest! I really wanted to read the Brothers Karamazov or the Idiot, but I didn't feel like starting on a huge book just yet.

Finally, I also have ambitious plans about reading a little bit of Anne az élet iskolájában (L.M. Montgomery). I really don't have any idea about how much comprehension I am aiming at and what degree of dictionary use I am going to allow myself. I am really going to try to read it in a highly relaxed way and tried to get through as many pages as possible instead of as many understood words as possible.

And I am very well aware that French is missing. I will see if that can't be fixed.

I would say those are my reading plans for Christmas. Add to that ambitious grammar study and big amounts of wine and chocolate. And ridiculous amounts of Christmas cookies when I go home to Sweden, cause you know... mothers and so on...

*gulp*

So, this is my first Hungarian recording, inspired by Cathy.
It was damned hard, I so am not used to speaking this language -_-

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Magyaróra

Seriously, how could I miss that Magyaróra has an English interface and that it's full of useful stuff like this? I'm currently reading about coffee, appropriately enough at my coffee job! If my hands were normal I would write loads, but they aren't so... I'll be back later with more French posts.

Mes lectures

Cette fois j'aimerais, de façon tout à fait désordonnée, parler de deux de mes lectures qui me plaisent beaucoup. C'est uniquement en écrivant cela que je me rends compte qu'il s'agit en fait de deux des livres des soeurs Brontë ! Je n’y avais même pas pensé.

Quand j'avais 15 ans, j'ai lu « Les Hauts De Hurlevent » en anglais : c'était pour moi quelque chose de nécessaire, car je pensais que c'était un livre que tout le monde avait lu et dont tous connaissaient l'histoire. J’avais toujours entendu les noms des grands classiques anglais, c’était la même chose que de savoir le nom de la reine du pays. Oui, je vivais dans un tout autre monde (celui de ma mère professeur d'anglais et de suédois) et j'allais être très déçue avec l'autre monde par la suite. Je le suis toujours, et le fait que je suis un genre de misanthrope rend probablement ce livre encore plus parfait pour moi (comme tous les livres des Brontës). De toute façon, et cela est même un peu drôle, je le lisais pour la première fois quand mes mains commençaient à me poser des problèmes (tendinite), ce qui est aussi le cas maintenant.

À l'époque, je considérais que c'était très important de lire les classiques. Je ne les considérais pas comme des livres ordinaires et ce n'était pas très important qu'ils soient tout le temps super intéressants ; ils avaient le droit d'être légèrement ennuyeux ! Je me souviens que je trouvais que le livre était quelque peu lent, mais je m'attendais à cela, ce n'était rien d'étonnant. Par contre, je ne pensais jamais à la langue, je ne pensais jamais à des mots inconnus (quoiqu'il y en avait certainement), je le lisais tout simplement, et au milieu vient ce chapitre, dont certainement tous qui ont lu le livre se souviennent, qui m’a complètement emportée et qui m'emporte toujours. Par la suite, je n'ai pas pu ne pas aimer ce roman. Complètement impossible. Désormais, c'était mon livre :-)


Maintenant je lis ce livre en russe - et j'ai l'impression de le lire depuis toujours (probablement parce que je lis un grand nombre de livres en même temps et il me faut beaucoup de temps pour les finir tous) - et j'arrive de nouveau à ce passage. Je comprends très bien que cette histoire m'a impressionnée quand j'avais 15 ans ; elle me laisse toujours dans un état... je ne sais quoi.

Je ne pense pas, par contre, que ce livre serait le même en suédois. Il y a quelque chose qui le rend plus puissant en langue étrangère. Quand j'ai commencé à le lire il y plus que 7 mois, j'ai fréquemment eu besoin de consulter le dictionnaire, mais maintenant, arrivée au milieu, il me suffit de m'y tourner deux fois par page ou même pas du tout. La lecture est très agréable et je suis tellement contente d'avoir décidé de lire « Les Hauts De Hurlevent » en russe.

Depuis quelques jours, je lis aussi « Jane Eyre » en texte parallèle hongrois -- anglais. Je ne sais pas exactement quand je l'ai lu, mais probablement à l'âge de 16 ans. Je ne l'ai pas du tout aimé comme le livre d'Emily, c'était beaucoup trop romantique, parfait et, à mon avis à l'époque, ridicule. Maintenant, je suis un peu plus cultivée et je sais apprécier le livre plus – ou disons que j’apprécie l'histoire ; je n'ai lu ce livre qu'une fois, mais j'ai vu le film plusieurs fois. Mais alors, je suis maintenant en train de le lire en hongrois ! En le lisant, c'est-à-dire en lisant les premières pages car c'est un procès très long, j'ai retrouvé beaucoup du plaisir de la lecture et de l'apprentissage des langues.

Quand je lis «Jane Eyre», je procède phrase par phrase. Je regarde la phrase hongroise pour voir si je peux comprendre quelque chose. D'habitude, je comprends quelques mots, mais c'est très rare que je comprenne la phrase entière. Ensuite, je regarde la phrase anglaise et je les compare : j'essaye de faire correspondre les adjectifs, les verbes, les noms. S'il y a plusieurs, c'est-à-dire s'il y a plusieurs adjectifs, j'utilise mon dictionnaire (et ça me rend très heureuse, je ne l'ai pas acheté pour rien :-)) et pour finir je souligne les mots correspondants dans les deux colonnes. J'utilise un autre stylo fluo pour souligner les faits grammaticaux dont je m'aperçois mais qui ne sont pas toujours très évidents pour moi : les suffixes, les affixes, les infixes... Je vais peut-être faire un effort pour apprendre ces mots aussi, mais je ne sais pas encore ;-)


Quel bonheur que les soeurs Brontë aient existé ! Elles m'aident à apprendre et le russe, et le hongrois !

A Hungarian song.

Napoleon Boulevard is a cozy old Hungarian group that I like and listen to a lot (even though I can't follow the lyrics like... at all), and I thought I'd share one song here. I also thought it would be interesting to see how many words out of the lyrics I actually know, so I have put those in bold.

Játék



Egy játék megesett, jókat nevetett rajta egy tucat ember
Falnak szegezett arccal gyerekek várták ki esik el
Jó játék, hiszen nem volt tét, csak a sorrend nem dőlt el
Ha mégis volt, az az egy szempont: milyen a színe

Göndör hajadat, ében fekete bőröd ne takard el
Sárga a kezed, játszom veled is, kérlek ne szaladj el!
Ha Lou sírna, Johny elringat, Eduard majd énekel
Ha Ráhel fél ugye megbékél vele Michael.

Refr.:
Menekülnél, játszani kell
Szól a parancs: "Hajtsd végre!"
Menekülnél, túl nagy a tét
Mondd ki marad majd élve?

Láttam sebeket, asszony kezeket fegyvernehezékkel
Hosszú sorokon, fából faragott sírokon neve sincsen
Ha Lou sírna, Johny elringat, Eduard majd énekel
Ha Ráhel fél ugye megbékél vele Michael.

Refr.

Szép tömött sorrendben jönnek a katonák, zöld színű jelmezben
Kőkemény arccal, hogy mindenki megijed, látták a filmekben.

Refr. 2x