Király! My parents are from Nagyvárad (Oradea for the uniniciated 🤣). They fled from Ceaușescu’s regime to Sweden in 88. I was born just a few months later. Thankfully, my parents only every spoke with me in Hungarian, so that’s one language “for free”. Outside of home, “on the streets”, I got the Swedish language for free. Being exposed to both languages on a daily basis from the beginning of my life, I achieved them both as truly native languages.

It has always been “funny” when I talk to Hungarians from Hungary, because I clearly lack some everyday vocabulary. After all, what I learned was the household specific language. One time, when I was traveling in Hungary for a week or two just for fun, I was in a restaurant in Budapest and I was ordering some salad. The waitress then asked me, “Öntet?” and I panicked. I panicked HARD. “What the fuck is ‘öntet’?!” I asked myself. You could probably hear the sound of my brain working to figure it out. I went through all the possible meanings, even the ridiculous ones:

• if “önt” == “pour” then “öntet” = “make somebody pour something”. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO POUR HERE AND FOR WHOM?!
• if “ön” == formal version of “you” and “tett” == third person singularis or pluralis of “do/did” or “place/placed” then “öntet” = maybe “you did/placed”? But she clearly was saying “-tet”, not “-tett”. WHAT DID I PLACE WHERE WHEN?! GOD SAVE ME.
  In the end, I had to turn around and ask my Hungarian friend, almost crying, what it means, and when I heard her say “dressing”, it all made sense. Fuck me… 🤣

I recently have been trying to relearn/polish up on Hungarian though, so during my vacation this year, I used to sit outside on sunny days reading A Pál utcai fiúk out loud. 😃

Where are you from? :)