What writing system does Hungarian use?

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”.

Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?

Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.

Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?

Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.

Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?

Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.

Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?

Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.

How does word lookup work while reading?

Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.

Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?

Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.

Do stories include audio or narration?

Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).

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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.

Quick facts about Hungarian

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

Sources

About the Hungarian language

Language family	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

Hungarian reading proficiency benchmarks (CEFR)

Stichos level	Approximate framework equivalent	Reader profile
A0	Pre-A1	Early Beginner
A1	CEFR A1	Beginner
A2	CEFR A2	Elementary
B1	CEFR B1	Intermediate
B2	CEFR B2	Upper Intermediate

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.

Readability design principles

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.

https://www.magyarpedagogia.hu/index.php/magyarpedagogia/article/view/633

Script & grammar scaffolding

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.

Related academic & framework resources

CEFR Global Scale (Council of Europe): The Council of Europe’s summary of the six common reference levels, A1 to C2.
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.
The Hungarian Gigaword Corpus: The LREC 2014 paper by Csaba Oravecz, Tamás Váradi and Bálint Sass.
Tankönyvi szövegek nyelvi feldolgozhatóságának mutatói és vizsgálati módszerei: Ágnes Lukács, Péter Rácz and Bence Kas on measuring the readability of Hungarian textbook texts (Magyar Pedagógia 122(2), 2022).

Frequently asked questions

What writing system does Hungarian use?: 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”.
Is Stichos suitable for complete beginners with zero prior knowledge (A0)?: Yes. A0 is a primary focus, designed for readers with no prior knowledge. A1 then adds basic everyday vocabulary and simple connected clauses as your foundation grows.
Are Stichos levels the same as CEFR levels?: Not exactly. Stichos levels use the familiar CEFR names, from A0 to B2, and are modelled on the CEFR (the Common European Framework of Reference), so a Stichos B1 is meant to feel close to a B1 in your course book. They aren't an official CEFR rating, and different books and exams draw the lines in slightly different places. A0 is Stichos's own addition, just below the framework's first level.
Are the stories written by AI, and how accurate are they?: Yes. Stories are generated by AI and then checked by further automated steps against the grammar and vocabulary rules for your level. That catches most problems, but it isn't a human editor, so an occasional unnatural phrase or slip can get through. Treat Stichos as practice material, and check anything you're unsure of with a teacher or a reference.
Can I read stories with explanations in my native language?: Yes. Stichos allows you to pair any target language with any native support language. You can read a Croatian story with French glosses, or a German story with Spanish explanations.
How does word lookup work while reading?: Tap or click any word for its meaning in that sentence, explained in your own language. In the full version, you can save any word to your Vocab Bank for later review.
Is the preview free, and what happens to my email?: Yes. The preview is free and needs no account. If you join the Reading List, we use your email to send your 3 free sample stories (PDF, after you confirm your address) and to let you know when we fully open. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle it.
Do stories include audio or narration?: Story narration isn't part of the preview. At launch, the Premium Audio add-on reads every story aloud in a natural-sounding AI voice, in 39 of our 40 languages (Esperanto doesn't have audio support yet).

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