Flascards for Hungharian and any other languge.

Have you ever heard about flash card ? 

According to the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia :

"A flashcard or flash card is a set of cards bearing information, as words or numbers, on either or both sides, used in classroom drills or in private study. One writes a question on a card and an answer overleaf. Flashcards can bear vocabulary, historical dates, formulas or any subject matter that can be learned via a question and answer format. Flashcards are widely used as a learning drill to aid memorization by way of spaced repetition." 

I am an addicted to the flashcards, I cannot imagine my language studies without a set of flash cards, no matter what language or method I am studying with, flashcard is a compulsory element, so as an extra help for my Pimsleur Hungarian lessons, I prepared a set of flashcards for the first 3 lessons, the most difficult for a beginner with no previous knowledge. 

Set of free pdf flashcard for the Hungarian lessons:

Lesson 01 - pdf

Lesson 02 - pdf  Lesson 03 - pdf

Cut your flashcards and fold them.

Pile and organise them.

Mantain them organised in bags
and study them.

Rules to Use Pimsler (by the producers):In order to gain the full benefits from the Pimsleur Language Programs, stick to the guidelines below.

• Choose a quiet place where you can practice without interruption and a time of day when your mind is most alert and your body least fatigued. You might study in your car, listening to the program while you commute or travel.
• Once you've started the program, simply follow the tutor's instructions.
• Speak out loud when directed by the tutor and answer questions. There will be pauses after every instruction, giving you time to reply. It is essential to your progress that you speak out in a normal conversational voice when asked to respond. Your active participation in thinking and speaking is required for your success in mastering this course. After your response, a confirmation will be provided as reinforcement.
• Do not have a paper and pen nearby during the lessons, and do not refer to dictionaries or other books. The Pimsleur Method works with the language-learning portion of your mind, requiring language to be processed in its spoken form. You will only interrupt the learning process if you try to write the words you hear.
• Complete the lesson units in strict consecutive order-don't skip around!
• Try your best to work through only one particular lesson (30 minutes long) each and every day. Dr. Pimsleur's research shows 30 minutes to be the optimum period for learning language, after which the mind loses its ability to retain new information. Although you should do no more than one particular lesson per day, you can repeat the same lesson unit any time during the day.
• If you are responding correctly about eighty percent of the time, then you're ready to proceed to the next lesson on the following day. It is important to keep moving forward, but also not to set unreasonable standards of perfection that will keep you from progressing, which is why we recommend the eighty percent figure as a guide.
• If you do not feel comfortable moving on to the next lesson, simply repeat the lesson. Daily contact with the language is critical to successful learning. As long as one lesson is completed each day, even if it is repeated, you will be making progress!

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More resources to learn Hungarian: FSI Hungarian

Since I have started to study Hungarian with Pimsleur Method (more about this can be found here), I have been looking for more resources to use after finishing Pimsleur, because it has only one level, it was when I came across an old method produced by the Foreign Service Institute, I have heard about this method before, I have even studied one of its books before, but the Hungarian course is absolutely amazing. A friend of mine has lent it to me, and I put it on the table and thanked him, but he insisted that I should look at the book quickly, but I told him that the aim of my studies is to see how good is Pimsleur and that I had no interest in the language itself, but he insisted that even with this in mind I should check the book. Wow! for my surprise the book taught somethings I had learned with Pimsleur, so I put the audio and I became astonished on how the course was conduced, you can really learn the language almost effortlessly, the book does most of the work for you. It has a terrible design, and a boring audio style, but it is what every method should be. I will continue my study with Pimsleur Hungrian, but I will try to resist to not check at times FSI course.

You can find out more about FSI courses in Internet or even in shops like Amazon, there are several versions of them, and they are available in many languages, unfortunately not all with the same quality as the one found in Hungarian.

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How about learning Hungarian?

The photo  was taken in front of  Hungarian
Institute in Paris. 

I have been reading a blog and watching the videos of a great English polyglot,his name is Richard Simcott, he decided to test the real efficiency of a very famous method called Pimsleur (see the link to his chalenge here), this method has helped me a lot with some languages that I speak, so I am personally a fan of this method, but I have never used it with languages I have no previous knowledge of even interest, Richard proposed a challenge of thirty days to examine the efficiency of this method, and what gained my attention was the fact that I have no interest in the selected language, that is hungarian, and I have never read or even heard this language before. So I decided by myself to get into this challenge as well and see how important is the inner wish to learn a new language.

Sometimes in this blog and in my lessons with my students I am in the habit of emphasizing  the fact that you need to be motivated, but now I realised that motivation is important but it has nothing to do with passion for the language itself, in this case Hungarian, that is if I really put all my efforts to learn something even without liking it I CAN really learn it. Richard wants to check the efficiency of the method itself, but as I believe in the method I want to check the factors: motivation and desire for a language in particular.

I will try to answer the following questions during the next 30 days:

1) Shall I be able to learn a language and speak it without  any interest in it, if I put all my "obsession" in learning it?

2)Is the method effective because of the method itself or because of other factors? 

Maybe together with Richard's conclusion (please check his website to keep updated) we can examine how far can Pimsleur take us in its first level, and other backgrounds in learning a foreign language.

How do I follow Pimsleur Method?

As I mentioned before I have already used Pimsleur, so I am familiar with its procedures, thus I simply follow its instruction, that is listen to one lesson a day and answer when it is required to do so, out loud. When I have an available extra time I do the lesson again on the same day, and I usually do not use other method while doing Pimsleur.

How about the reading?

When you get at a particular lesson the audio will ask you to read the accompanied booklet to have a contact with the written language as well.

Obviously, as I said before, I am obsessive for the language learning itself so during the studying period I listen to musics and podcasts, read books, watch tv program everything in the target language, but not other methods because I prefer to know a course content quite well and completely than just a part of many others, but I use several authentic material to improve the contact.

Do you want do get into the challenge as well?
Be free to do it, we started it on 15th of Abril 2012.

Where can you know more about this method and buy it?
Sites like ebay (mercadolivre, mercadolibre) sell second hand Original Pimsleur courses, or you can go to the offical site by clicking here to know more and buy the course direct with them, keep in mind that we have no conections with the producers of this course and no money transaction is involved in this challenge, it is just a free initiative to help other language learners to choose material.

How can you follow the challenge?
Simply by visting this website (add it to your favourites), or at my twitter or facebook.

In a short time I will post somethings and some extra material I am producing, like flashcards to help me (and maybe you) in this process.  

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