Generate level-matched stories and reading sheets for your students.
Teaching Hungarian requires reading materials that respect the unique grammar rules your students are learning. Graded readers allow your students to see new vocabulary and sentence structures in context without being overwhelmed. With Stichos, you can explore live sample texts now or prepare for tools that help you build reading content for any lesson.
Este a Balatonnál
Amália a Balatonnál van.
Amália is at Lake Balaton.
Most már este van.
It is evening now.
A levegő meleg.
The air is warm.
Amália sétál egy kicsit.
Amália walks a little.
Nagyon éhes lesz.
She gets very hungry.
Egy lángost akar venni.
She wants to buy a lángos.
Meglát egy strandbüfét.
She spots a beach buffet.
Odasétál a büféhez.
She walks over to the buffet.
Egy lángost kérek.
A lángos, please.
A lángos nagyon finom.
The lángos is very delicious.
Sok sajt van rajta.
There is a lot of cheese on it.
Amália megfogja a forró lángost.
Amália grabs the hot lángos.
Keresztülmegy a füvön.
She crosses the grass.
Megáll a víz mellett.
She stops next to the water.
Ott van egy pad.
There is a bench there.
Amália leül a padra.
Amália sits down on the bench.
A víz nagyon csendes.
The water is very quiet.
Amália megeszi a lángost.
Amália eats the lángos.
Nézi a szép vizet.
She watches the beautiful water.
A nap lassan lemegy.
The sun slowly goes down.
Az ég tiszta és piros.
The sky is clear and red.
A nap nagyon szép.
The sun is very beautiful.
A lángos is nagyon jó.
The lángos is also very good.
Egy kis kacsa úszik ott.
A little duck is swimming there.
Amália nézi a kacsát.
Amália looks at the duck.
A nap lement.
The sun has gone down.
Most sötét van.
It is dark now.
Amália boldog.
Amália is happy.
About the Hungarian Language
Speakers
Hungarian has about 12 million native speakers (2021–2023 figures, as given by Wikipedia); in Hungary's 2011 census, 9.8 million people gave it as their first language.1
Did you know?
Hungarian is a Uralic language, not an Indo-European one, and with Finnish and Estonian it is one of the three largest Uralic languages, yet they are not mutually intelligible: Finns and Hungarians could not understand each other's version of a sentence built from shared roots (Eleven hal úszik a víz alatt).2
The main challenge
Verbs have separate indefinite and definite conjugations, chosen by the object: látok means "I see (something)", while látom means "I see it" or "I see the...".3
Most suffixes come in two or three forms, picked by vowel harmony with the word they attach to: "in" is -ban in lakásban ("in the flat") but -ben in fürdőben ("in the bathroom").3
Uralic → Ugric, grouped with Mansi and Khanty (the validity of the Ugric branch is debated)1
Speakers
12 to 13 million native speakers (national censuses and Ethnologue), some 9.8 million of them in Hungary (2011 census), with large communities in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine. It is the most widely spoken Uralic language.1
Primary script
Latin script: a 44-letter alphabet with the digraphs cs, gy, ny, sz, zs and others, the trigraph dzs, and long vowels marked with acute and double acute accents (á, ő, ű). Vowel length changes meaning: öt is “five”, őt is “him” or “her”.2
Word order & typology
Agglutinative, with suffixes that follow vowel harmony and no grammatical gender. Word order is set by topic and focus (the focused element sits directly before the verb) rather than a fixed SVO. Stichos’s A0 readers put the subject first, as in Péter kávét iszik.1,3
Official status
Official in Hungary and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union (since 2004). Also official in Serbia’s Vojvodina province and in three municipalities of Slovenia’s Prekmurje region, and a recognised minority language in Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Croatia, Czechia and Ukraine.1,4
Stichos levels are modelled on the CEFR. The ECL exam centre in Pécs pairs four of these levels with Hungarian names:belépőfok (A2), alapfok (B1), középfok (B2) and felsőfok (C1). They are a guide to reading difficulty, not an official CEFR rating.
Reference corpora
The reference corpus for contemporary Hungarian is the Hungarian National Corpus (Magyar Nemzeti Szövegtár).1
MNSZ2: The second edition, version 2.0.5, holds more than a billion words of contemporary Hungarian and comes from the HUN-REN Research Centre for Linguistics. Registered users can build frequency lists and run collocation searches.1
The Hungarian Gigaword Corpus: Oravecz, Váradi and Sass (LREC 2014) describe how the corpus was expanded to about 1.5 billion tokens, with redesigned annotation suited to Hungarian’s rich morphology and new material from transcribed speech and social media.2
Register: Stichos writes standard modern Hungarian (the Budapest standard). Friends use informal te; strangers and official settings use formal Ön or Maga with third-person verbs.
Formulas such as Flesch were built for English and do not carry over directly to an agglutinative language, where one long word can stand for a whole English phrase.1
Hungarian textbook texts: Lukács, Rácz and Kas (Magyar Pedagógia, 2022) review readability formulas developed for other languages, ask whether they apply to Hungarian, and propose criteria for judging how processable Hungarian textbook texts are.1
Stichos: Stichos sets difficulty with level-by-level grammar rules and sentence-length limits rather than a single readability score. A0 sentences run three to five words, with no conjunctions; the limit rises level by level, to about 12 words at A2 and 17 at B1.
Tenses and moods: A0 uses only the present (jelen idő). A1 adds the past (múlt idő) and the future with fog plus the infinitive. A2 opens the imperative-subjunctive for direct requests and commands beyond the handful allowed at A1. The present conditional (feltételes mód) arrives at B1, the past conditional at B2.
Definite and indefinite conjugation: The verb changes with the definiteness of its object at every level, including A0: Péter kávét iszik (“Péter drinks coffee”) but Péter szereti a kávét (“Péter likes the coffee”). All suffixes follow vowel harmony.
Sentence building: At A0 each sentence is a single main clause, so Péter kávét főz és kávét iszik is written as two sentences. Conjunctions unlock in a fixed order, starting with és, de and vagy. A2 allows one subordinate clause per sentence, and B1 one level of embedding.
Requests and commands: Beginners order with the accusative and kérek, as in Egy kávét kérek (“A coffee, please”). At A0 imperatives appear only in fixed formulas such as Tessék; A1 adds five informal ones: nézd, gyere, vedd, várj and ülj le.
ECL exam levels: The ECL exam centre in Pécs, which runs its exams at A2, B1, B2 and C1 and publishes requirements for Hungarian as a foreign language.
ELTE Origó Nyelvi Centrum: The Origó language exam centre in Budapest, which runs a Hungarian as a foreign language exam among some 30 languages.
Magyar Nemzeti Szövegtár (MNSZ2): Search interface for the Hungarian National Corpus, from the HUN-REN Research Centre for Linguistics.
What is included in the free preview on this page?
You can try an A0 or A1 text right now in the live reader, complete with tap-to-translate words and line-by-line translations in your own language. If you join the Reading List, you will also receive 3 sample stories as a PDF.
Which language levels will Stichos support when it launches?
At launch, Educator Studio will cover every level from A0 through B2, letting you create reading materials for absolute beginners up to upper-intermediate learners.
How do I share reading passages with my students?
At launch, you can share any text you create by sending students a web link. There is no limit on how many share links you can generate, and at launch, Educator Studio can also print reading sheets as PDFs with a glossary and line-by-line translations.
Do my students need to create an account to read shared texts?
No, your students can open any shared link directly in their web browser without an account. They will be invited to set up a free account if they want to save their words and stories, but it is never required.
How does audio pronunciation work for my students?
At launch, students reading a shared story can tap any individual word to hear it spoken in a standard computer voice. If you add the Premium Audio option at launch, students gain natural-sounding voices for single words, multi-voice narration for dialogues, and MP3 audio exports.
How accurate are the texts generated by the platform?
Texts are written by AI and automatically checked against grammar and vocabulary rules for the chosen level. Because this check is automated rather than a human editor, occasional errors can occur, so you should review any text before sending it to your class.
Does Hungarian pose specific structural challenges for language learners?
Yes, as a Uralic language unrelated to Indo-European tongues, Hungarian features unique elements like vowel harmony across suffixes and distinct definite and indefinite verb conjugations depending on the sentence object.