How I Learned Hungarian Before Facebook Existed

I was 16, stuck in Lecco (my hometown), still in high school, and obsessed with a language spoken by about 13 million people in a landlocked country I’d visited exactly once.

It started with a family trip to Budapest and Prague. I came back completely in love with how Hungarian sounded - not just curious, actually in love. I started reading everything I could find on Omniglot and Proel, two websites that opened my eyes to language families and the fact that Hungarian was unlike anything around it.

Then I bought a phrasebook from a local bookshop. Grammar was in there too, which for me has always been what it is: the instruction manual. Useful until it becomes instinct, then you put it down.

Then I found Shared Talk.

I have no memory of how I found it. It was a language exchange platform - no photos, just a name and a short introduction. General chat rooms, private chat rooms. It was exactly what I needed and it had no business being that good.

The usual workflow was: you’d find someone, it clicked, and you’d move the conversation to MSN.

That’s how I met her. A Hungarian girl my age, studying Italian and Latin at school. We chatted every day - after homework, after dinner, whenever. About Italy, about Hungary, about politics. She corrected my Hungarian without being mean about it. I would try to build sentences and she would quietly fix them. I owe her most of what I know.

I lost contact with her when Facebook took over. She wasn’t interested in it. Years later I found out she had become a nun. I hope she’s well. I think about those conversations more than she probably knows.

What I built during that period was almost entirely written fluency. MSN had voice chat but we barely used it - she was shy, I was wary of the technology, and honestly we were both more comfortable typing. So I typed in Hungarian every single day for years, and my spoken Hungarian stayed basically at zero.

Then one year I was on a cruise and I walked into a shop and found two Hungarian women working there.

Hungarian is not a language you stumble across. I knew I had to say something. The problem was that everything I knew lived on the page. My brain was connected to my pen, not to my mouth.

So I sat down with a notebook, wrote out what I wanted to say, and read it aloud to them. Sentence by sentence, like a child sounding out words. It worked. One of those women and I still wish each other happy birthday every year. Sometimes we actually chat for a while. It has been fifteen+ years.

Around the same time I started thinking about how to find more Hungarian - but I was still in school, still in my hometown, and the internet of 2009 was not what it is now.

My solution was to open a YouTube channel and make a mini-course: Hungarian basics explained in Italian, and Italian basics explained in Hungarian. I also built a Facebook group to help people with Italian. It reached around 200 members.

Then everyone around me told me to stop wasting time and focus on school.

I listened. I closed it down. I spent the next ten years building a career I eventually left anyway.

If I had kept going, I’d have had a decade’s head start. That is my real regret - not that I didn’t know what I wanted, but that I let other people’s anxiety about safety convince me I was wrong. The path was clear. I just didn’t trust it.

I’m telling you this because the method I used then is the same one I use now, and the same one I teach.

• Talking every day about things that actually matter to you.

• Having time to think before you write.

• Not waiting for fluency before you express yourself.

• Using whatever technology you have to create the contact that life isn’t handing you yet.

I was 16, in Lecco, with a phrasebook and a chat room. It worked.

If you want to try the same approach with proper structure around it, the Frequency Circle is where I run it. Members write in their target language several times a week, I respond with questions and feedback, and the whole thing happens asynchronously - no evening classes, no scheduling headaches. There’s a one-week free trial.

If you want to work directly with me, you can start your free trial weeks by June 30 and lock in the old price (142€ for two months - after July 1st the price is going to be 162€)