There are some slight local differences in accent or vocabulary, but people from opposite sides of the country can easily understand one another. I am hoping that this will make it a bit easier to learn. I appreciate this after living in Italy, where dialects could almost feel like completely different languages.
Hungary uses its own currency, called the forint. Even though many countries in the European Union now use the euro, Hungary decided to keep its national currency. Right now, one U.S. dollar is worth about 330 forints.
In writing this, I started to do some research and discovered that the forint has actually been around for a long time. The name originally comes from the city of Florence in Italy, where gold coins called fiorino d’oro were used in the Middle Ages. Hungary started making its own gold forints around 1325 under King Charles I, using gold from the country’s mines. These coins were famous for their quality and became widely used across Europe. The forint stayed in use through the following centuries until the Austro-Hungarian Empire reformed its money system in 1892 and replaced it with the krone.
After World War I, Hungary created a new currency called the pengő, which was meant to stabilize the economy after years of inflation. The name comes from the Hungarian word pengeni, meaning “to ring,” like the sound of metal coins. It worked for a while, but during and after World War II, the pengő went through one of the worst periods of hyperinflation in history. Prices changed by the hour and people needed enormous stacks of bills to buy basic things like bread.
