Hungarian Class
I decided to sign up for an intensive Hungarian language course and it starts tomorrow. There were several options with varying intensity levels for the class. I opted for the "Rambo" version which goes hard for half a day every day (except weekends) for the next month. Unfortunately, Hungarian is known among linguists as one of the hardest languages in the world to learn--it's up there with Japanese and Finnish... But Hungarians themselves know this and so whenever a foreigner speaks even a bit decently, they love it. I have lots of room for improvement and figure the time is now.
On a somewhat related and humorous note--and which also demonstrates the difficulty of learning Hungarian--the pastor of the church we attend had a funny mix-up when he was speaking Hungarian today in church. We've been going to a Scottish Reformed church-plant in downtown Budapest and the head pastor is a native English speaker whose Hungarian is excellent. He was giving a brief message in Hungarian addressed directly at the little kids in the congregation and he used the word "Institutes" (as in Calvin's "Institutes"). One of the kids then asked him--in Hungarian--"what does Institutes mean"? As Agi explained it to me later (because I wanted to find out why most of the Hungarian adults in the congregation were quietly chuckling), when poor pastor Stevens tried to explain the meaning of "Institutes" he incorrectly used the verb for "make love." In Hungarian these very dissimilar words apparently sound very much alike. I'll ask about this tomorrow in class.