Why Hunglish is useful and how to overcome it?

First, let's see what Hunglish is.

It is the combination of the English and Hungarian languages.

By appearance, it resembles English, as they have English words in them.

In terms of structure, it is more or less Hungarian.

In other words, Hunglish is the language variant of English where more or less Hungarian sentence patterns carry more or less appropriately selected English words.

They are usually created by mirror-translation of Hungarian sentences into English, and so such sentences are more or less based on Hungarian sentence patterns.

It is not unique to Hungarian users of English, there are also variants like Spanlish, Gerlish, Russlish, Uzbeklish, and similar language varieties used by other nations learning English. It is certainly something to be praised, in that the ..lish writer is a brave person wishing to deliver his/her message in another language.

It marks the gradual advancement of English learners through various stages of excellence, from beginner to intermediate, advanced, and excellent levels of competence.

The more beginner a learner is, the more his/her command of English is prone to be affected by his/her mother tongue in formulating his/her English sentences, as their mother tongue infiltrates into their English sentences.

What is okay in their mother tongue is not okay in English. Wrong collocations: nouns are used with verbs that are okay in Hungarian, German, Uzbek, etc. and that are not okay in English. Wrong prepositions, wrong complements, wrong sentence patterns. Dictionaries help them select the correct legal term equivalent to their mother tongue, so they are generally chosen correctly. But the rest is prone to raise the eyebrows of a native speaker of English.

Hunglish, Gerlish, Frenchlish, etc., sentences are English sentences that everyone can tell have been written by non-native English speakers. It just feels. Experienced readers can even determine from the sentence pattern the mother tongue of the person having written the text.

As s/he advances in his/her learning English, s/he would tend to avoid using sentence patterns of their mother tongue, and start using more and more often and more and more precisely the sentence patterns of the English language.

English learners acquire English sentence patterns by reading and listening to numerous authentic English texts. How? When they are exposed to authentic English to a considerable extent, the sentence patterns infiltrate in their minds. For example, when reading a lot of texts about court judgments, they will filter these texts in their subtle mind into the following English sentence patterns:

court + enters + injunction + enjoining + person + from verb+ing,

court + finds + that + subject + verb,

court + enters + judgment + allowing + person + to verb1,

court + enters + judgment + ordering + person + to verb1.

They are English sentence patterns, and when they use them, their sentences will be at the level of UK and US legal professionals. Native pro excellence in legal English. No Hunglish, no Gerlish, no whateverlish.

The more such authentic sentence patterns are used, the less -lish their sentences will sound.

The journey from Hunglish (Gerlish, Finnlish etc.) to excellence in legal English is through using authentic English sentence patterns.

Using legal English sentence patterns – the secret of native pro excellence in legal English.

English for your success in Law ©

A Practical Guide to English for Law.