PREFACE.
The intention of the Author in the following pages is to supply the student of Hungarian with a handbook that will enable him to overcome the initial difficulties which have hitherto attended the study of this language.
To the English student Hungarian is accessible only through the medium of German; but the chief difficulty which the student has to contend with lies in the peculiarities of the language itself. With the exception of a few words borrowed from the German or Slav languages, Hungarian is so different in its structure from the other European languages (excepting Finnish and Turkish) that a new grammatical system, as well as a new vocabulary, has to be learnt. It is therefore obvious that Hungarian cannot be treated according to the rules usually adopted, and yet in most Hungarian Grammars the language is forced to accommodate itself to this framework of the Latin system; where this has been found impossible, as is generally the case, the student was left to shift for himself.
