Home / Best apps to learn a language / Hungarian
Prices and language coverage checked in September 2026.
Hungarian has about 14 million speakers, 12 million of them native, by the Ethnologue figures Wikipedia reports, among them about 1 million in Romania and 422,000 in Slovakia. It is a Uralic language with no relatives among its neighbours, so an English speaker starts with almost no free vocabulary beyond loans such as iskola and templom, and the grammar does the work prepositions do in English: 18 cases by the common count, vowel harmony and two conjugations for every verb. What Hungarian asks of an app is an explanation of the suffixes and the two conjugations, not only drills.
The app catalogue is thin. Babbel, Busuu, Rosetta Stone, Speak and Language Transfer have no Hungarian at all, Memrise has only user word lists, Pimsleur sells one Level of 30 lessons and Duolingo’s course stops at A2 by its own label, with no Stories. The strongest Hungarian-only material comes from a textbook, MagyarOK, a few live podcasts and the national library’s MEK, with 22,200+ free documents. So the apps below are compared on where they stop, what is free on day 30, whether the grammar is explained and whether a person corrects you.
The US Foreign Service Institute puts Hungarian in category III (of I to IV), about 1,100 class hours for an English speaker to reach professional working proficiency.
Hungarian puts on the end of a noun what English says with a preposition: a házban (in the house), a házból (out of the house), a házzal (with the house), 18 cases by the common count, most suffixes with two or three forms set by the stem’s vowels (házban, kertben). Possession is a suffix too (a házam, my house), and word order follows the focus (Péter ment el: it was Péter who left). Duolingo, Pimsleur and Glossika leave it to patterns; a tutor, MagyarOK and Mango’s notes explain it. Learn every noun with its common suffixes, not alone.
Every Hungarian verb has two sets of endings, and the object decides which you use: látok egy filmet (I see a film) against látom a filmet (I see the film). Clozemaster and Glossika show it in their sentences, and a Preply or italki tutor can explain it. There is no grammatical gender (ő is he and she), the articles are a, az and egy, and the stress is always on the first syllable, so the sounds are the easy part. Learn each new verb in both conjugations from the first week.
The alphabet has 8 digraphs and one trigraph (cs, dz, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty, zs, dzs), and two of them cross with English: sz is the English s and s is the English sh (sör, szél). Vowel length is written with an acute mark and changes the word (kor, kór; ver, vér), consonant length by doubling (hal, hall). Check the false friends: aktuális means current, szimpatikus likeable, farmer jeans and pár a few. Once you know the letters, the page tells you the sound; pick apps with native audio beside every text, and read the length marks aloud.
Duolingo’s Hungarian is A2 by its own label and was not among the 9 courses Duolingo took to B2 in April 2026. Pimsleur has one Level of 30 lessons; Mango prints no level, and a 2026 review puts it at A1 to A2. Glossika labels its sentences A1 to C1, and Talk In Hungarian is A1 to B2 by a 2026 review. Past A2 the material is a textbook (MagyarOK), a school (KKM Balassi, the Debrecen Summer School) or a tutor. Plan on a person and real Hungarian from A2: past it, the apps here drill but do not teach.
The ECL exam, run from Pécs through 178 centres in 38 countries, tests Hungarian at A2 to C1, for 30,000 HUF (A2) to 59,000 HUF (C1) in Hungary in 2026, in four separate skill modules from August 2026; ELTE Origó tests B1 to C1. Naturalisation asks for 8 years of residence and a constitutional basics test in Hungarian, 40 questions with 28 correct, per a 2026 lawyer’s summary, which also reports an A2 requirement for the permanent residence card. Descendants of citizens face a consul’s interview in Hungarian. Book the level your application names.
Best free daily course
The Hungarian course is A2 by Duolingo’s own label, recorded by an unofficial tracker in July 2025 with 110 units and 1,915 lessons, and Hungarian was not among the 9 courses Duolingo took to B2 in April 2026. There are no Stories and no Video Call. It builds a daily habit for the first months, then you need more.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A free daily Hungarian habit from zero to A2; on a laptop, without the Energy cap.
Best live tutors
Preply lists 106 Hungarian tutors, at an average of US$28 an hour on its Hungarian page. Below B1, pick a trained teacher who can explain in your language, since the cases and the two conjugations are what a person explains best; from B1 on, a weekly lesson keeps the conversation in Hungarian and corrects you.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Anyone from A1 who needs a person to explain the suffixes and then talk to them in Hungarian, once a week.
Best for listening with notes
The one big library of Hungarian audio lessons, “thousands of lessons” by the site’s own count, in pathways by level, with transcripts and lesson notes, and the first 3 lessons of every pathway are free. It is listening with notes rather than a grammar course, and its prices are sold on a countdown.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A1 to B1 learners who want Hungarian in their ears every day with a transcript to check, free for the first lessons of each pathway.
Best pay as you go tutors
italki lists 56 Hungarian tutors, with trial lessons from US$7 to US$20 (most US$8 to US$16) and a professional teacher at US$49 an hour, and you pay per lesson with no subscription. It is the smaller pool next to Preply’s 106, and the one to use if you want a lesson now and then rather than 4 a month.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Anyone from A0 who wants a Hungarian speaker to correct them now and then, without a subscription.
Best for reading real books
Lingo7 puts a translation in your own language under every sentence of a Hungarian book (49 languages), reads it aloud and drills saved words in 12 kinds of exercise. All its 100 books are C1 by our estimate, so A2 to B2 readers start with the Stories or an imported book. It is our app, and it has no course.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: C1 readers who want the Hungarian classics with their own language under the text, A2 to B2 learners starting with the Stories, and anyone with their own EPUBs.
Best for speaking from lesson one
Pimsleur’s Hungarian is one Level of 30 audio lessons, about 15 hours, in which you answer out loud and words come back at spaced intervals, in standard Hungarian “based on the Northeastern dialect”, in Pimsleur’s words. Pimsleur publishes no CEFR level and sells no Hungarian Level 2. A month of Hungarian Premium covers the 30 lessons at one a day.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A trip in a month, a commute, or anyone who wants to say their first Hungarian sentences out loud before they read.
Best for shadowing sentences
Glossika labels its Hungarian A1 to C1, with 5,000+ words in native sentences you hear and repeat aloud, sentence by sentence, and a 7 day trial with no credit card; a 2026 review rates it highly for Hungarian listening. It drills the cases in real sentences and explains none of them, at US$19.99 a month for one language.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A2 to C1 learners who want native sentences in their ears and mouth every day, and can pay for it.
Best for reading with audio
LingQ lists Hungarian as a full language, not beta, promises “a vast Hungarian library” with “1000’s of hours” of audio lessons and transcripts, in the vendor’s words, and turns any article, ebook or YouTube video into a lesson. It publishes no lesson count, so plan on importing MEK’s free EPUBs; the free tier is a demo.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: B1 and up with a podcast habit or MEK books you want to turn into study, and the budget for it.
Best sentence drill
Fill the blank in real Hungarian sentences, in collections from the 500 most common words to more than 50,000, with Fast Track levels 0 to 3, and the case endings and the two conjugations come up sentence after sentence. Its source, Tatoeba, holds 442,536 Hungarian sentences, and the free 30 sentences a day are enough beside a course.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Ten minutes a day on the suffixes from A2 upward, beside a course, a tutor or a book.
Best free course with a library card
A course built on conversations, with grammar notes, cultural notes and native audio, per Mango’s Hungarian page, which prints no unit or lesson count; a 2026 review puts it at A1 to A2 and calls it light on depth. Many US public libraries give it free with a library card, which makes it a second free start beside Duolingo.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A0 to A2 learners with a US library card who want a course with grammar notes at no cost.
Best for video input
Hungarian subtitles and a translation into your language side by side on YouTube, with a dictionary on click, and the subtitles and lookups cost nothing; Hungarian is among its 27 languages per the Chrome Web Store. It works on any Hungarian video with subtitles. The Netflix side broke in June 2026 and in September works with known bugs.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: B1 and up with a laptop, turning Hungarian YouTube into listening practice.
Best vocabulary trainer
Free spaced repetition with shared Hungarian decks on AnkiWeb: two MagyarOK decks matched to the textbook’s first two volumes, a Core 100 deck with audio, a Core 1k deck and a Hungarian Sentences deck. It is the cheapest way to keep the words you meet in lessons and books, and it teaches nothing on its own.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Keeping the words you met in lessons, books and podcasts, at any level.
Duolingo + HungarianPod101 + Pimsleur
Do Duolingo every day, on a laptop if the Energy cap bites, and take the first 3 free lessons of each HungarianPod101 pathway with the notes open. Pimsleur is the paid choice if you want to say your first sentences out loud before you read; with a US library card, Mango is a second free start with grammar notes. Learn every noun with its suffixes and every verb in both conjugations from the first week.
Preply + Clozemaster + LingQ
Duolingo ends at A2 by its label, so from here the course is a person: book a Preply tutor once a week, or italki lessons as you need them, to explain the cases and the two conjugations. Drill the endings in Clozemaster’s sentences, listen to Plain Hungarian and RackaPod, and put your first MEK books into LingQ. Start reading with Lingo7’s Stories at A2, then easy books you import from MEK; its shelf of classics starts at C1, by our estimate.
Lingo7 + Language Reactor + Preply
Courses thin out here. Read your own books in Lingo7, Kosztolányi from MEK first, and, from C1 by our estimate, the classics on its shelf, watch Hungarian YouTube with Language Reactor, move from learner podcasts to Telex and MediaKlikk replays, and talk about all of it with your tutor. With an ECL date, work the sample tests on eclexam.eu and book a tutor who has taught the exam.
| App | Role | Levels | Coverage for Hungarian | Free | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duolingo | Best free daily course | A0 to A2 | Standard Hungarian, no dialect choice; A2 by Duolingo’s label; 110 units and 1,915 lessons by an unofficial tracker, no Stories and no Video Call | Every lesson; Energy cap on a phone | US$13 to 17 a month, US$7 to 10 a month yearly |
| Preply | Best live tutors | A1 to C2 | 106 Hungarian tutors; average US$28 an hour on the page, US$25 for native speakers and US$20 for non-native tutors | None | Average US$28 an hour, subscription only |
| HungarianPod101 | Best for listening with notes | A1 to B1 | “Thousands of lessons” by the site; pathways by level; first 3 lessons of each pathway free; podcast feed last updated 6 July 2022 | First 3 lessons of each pathway | US$10 a month |
| italki | Best pay as you go tutors | A0 to C2 | 56 Hungarian tutors; trial lessons US$7 to US$20, most US$8 to US$16; a professional teacher at US$49 an hour | None | US$4 to 40 a lesson |
| Lingo7 | Best for reading real books | A2 to C1 | 100 public domain books, all C1 by our estimate; Stories in two versions, adapted for A1 to A2 and original for B1 to B2; your own books in 7 formats (EPUB, PDF, FB2, DOCX, TXT, Markdown, HTML); native audio in a Hungary accent; translation into 49 languages | First page of each book | US$5 a month, US$2.50 a month yearly |
| Pimsleur | Best for speaking from lesson one | A0 to A1 | Level 1 only: 30 lessons, about 15 hours; standard Hungarian “based on the Northeastern dialect”; no vendor CEFR claim | 7 day trial | About US$20 a month, or US$150 once |
| Glossika | Best for shadowing sentences | A2 to C1 | Hungarian; 5,000+ words in native sentences, A1 to C1 by Glossika’s label; annual plans on promotion in September 2026 | 7 day trial | US$20 a month; yearly on promotion |
| LingQ | Best for reading with audio | B1 to C1 | Hungarian fully supported, not beta; library size not published; anything you import | 20 saved words | US$15 a month, US$10 a month yearly |
| Clozemaster | Best sentence drill | A2 to C1 | Hungarian from English; collections from the 500 to the 50,000+ most common words, Fast Track levels 0 to 3; sentences drawn from Tatoeba, which holds 442,536 in Hungarian | 30 sentences a day | US$9 to 13 a month, US$6 to 7 a month yearly |
| Mango Languages | Best free course with a library card | A0 to A2 | Hungarian course with grammar and cultural notes; no unit or lesson count published; A1 to A2 by a 2026 third-party review | Free through many US libraries | Free via many libraries; US$10 a month yearly |
| Language Reactor | Best for video input | B1 to C2 | Any Hungarian YouTube video with subtitles; Hungarian among its 27 languages per the Chrome Web Store; Netflix working with known bugs in September 2026 | Most of it | US$6 a month, US$3.33 a month yearly |
| Anki | Best vocabulary trainer | A1 to C1 | Shared decks for the MagyarOK volumes, Core 100 with audio, Core 1k and Hungarian Sentences | All of it (iOS US$24.99) | Free; iOS US$25 once |
Prices are US store or vendor prices as of September 2026, yearly plans shown as the monthly equivalent. The same app often costs less on its own site than in the App Store, and more in Europe than in the US.
Free on this site: public domain Hungarian books you can open in the app, and short Hungarian texts at A1, A2 and B1 with a translation.
We have no affiliate deals with any app named here, and none of the links pay us. Prices and coverage come from the vendor’s own help or pricing pages or its US store listing, checked in September 2026, and every other figure names its source in the text; the judgement calls lean on independent reviews, and on the one star reviews for the parts a landing page never shows, like what happens on renewal. Where a vendor’s pages contradict each other, the card says so.
Refund rules, the traps to avoid and the same apps compared by level for every language are on the best apps to learn a language page.
For a start, yes, and it is free: the Hungarian course has 110 units and 1,915 lessons by an unofficial tracker’s count. On its own it is not enough: the course is A2 by Duolingo’s own label, Hungarian was not among the 9 courses Duolingo took to B2 in April 2026, there are no Stories and no Video Call for Hungarian, and on a phone Energy runs out after about 2 to 3 lessons a day, by a third-party count (the web version runs on hearts). Add HungarianPod101’s free lessons for listening, Anki with the MagyarOK decks, and a tutor to explain the cases once you can put a few sentences together.
Not by the State Department’s ranking: its hardest group, on the third-party copies of its list we could open, is Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and Hungarian is not in it. The grammar is what takes time: 18 cases by the common count, vowel harmony, two conjugations for every verb and almost no vocabulary shared with English beyond loans, and its only relatives, Finnish among them, are distant. Against that, the spelling is phonemic once you know the digraphs, the stress is always on the first syllable and there is no gender.
None of them is an exam course, so start with the exam body: eclexam.eu has sample tests for Hungarian at A2, B1, B2 and C1, and KKM Balassi in Budapest runs an online ECL preparation course. The ECL costs 30,000 HUF (A2) to 59,000 HUF (C1) in Hungary in 2026, and from August 2026 each of the four skills is a separate module with a 60% pass mark. Naturalisation sets no CEFR level, but its constitutional basics test (40 questions, 28 correct) and the interview are in Hungarian, per a 2026 lawyer’s summary, and a law firm describes the interview as conversational B2; the permanent residence card now asks for A2, per the same 2026 summary.
Reading grows your vocabulary, and Hungarian spelling is phonemic, so the page tells you how a word sounds once you know the digraphs; the grammar sits in the suffixes, so read with audio and watch the endings. Lingo7, our app, puts a translation under each sentence of a Hungarian book, reads it aloud in a Hungary accent and drills the words you save in 12 kinds of exercise, for US$5 a month or US$30 a year. Its Hungarian shelf starts at C1, all 100 books by our estimate, so begin with its Stories or Gabriella Kiss’ Olvasok magyarul, import Kosztolányi’s Édes Anna from MEK around B2, and reach the shelf with Molnár’s A Pál-utcai fiúk.
For a course, Duolingo: every lesson is free, to A2 by its own label, with Energy capping study on a phone; with a US library card, Mango adds grammar notes. For listening, HungarianPod101’s free lessons (the first 3 of every pathway and a 50+ lesson phrase course), Plain Hungarian for A1 to A2 stories and RackaPod. For the words, Anki with the shared MagyarOK decks, free except on iPhone; for sentences, Clozemaster’s free 30 a day. For books, MEK’s 22,200+ free documents and Project Gutenberg’s 656. Busuu, whose free plan is the usual answer for other languages, has no Hungarian. For a tutor you pay: Preply on a subscription, or italki per lesson from US$7 trials.
None of the big apps explains them: Duolingo, Pimsleur and Glossika show the endings in patterns and leave the rule to you, and Clozemaster drills them in real sentences without a word of explanation. Mango’s course carries grammar notes, and Talk In Hungarian, US$97 once for lifetime access, is A1 to B2 by a 2026 review. The explanations live outside the apps: the MagyarOK textbooks with their grammar tables (now at mnyi.eu), Hungarian Lesson With Zsuzsi on YouTube, HungarianPod101’s lesson notes, and a Preply or italki tutor. Check any ending against Wiktionary’s tables, free.
Both are Uralic languages, and that is where the help ends: they are distant relatives with almost no shared everyday vocabulary and no mutual understanding, so a Finnish speaker learns nearly every Hungarian word from zero like everyone else. What carries over is the shape of the grammar: suffixes where English has prepositions, vowel harmony choosing the form of each suffix, possession marked on the noun, and no grammatical gender. A learner who has met those ideas in Finnish or Turkish finds the Hungarian system familiar in kind and new in every detail. Everyone else meets the ideas in Hungarian first, which is why a tutor or a textbook matters more here than in Spanish or Dutch.
Read your first page free, in Hungarian.