In the battle of Me vs. Magyarul, it seems magyarul (Hungarian language) is once again winning. As much as I loved meeting a bunch of American Fulbrighters to Italy at the Berlin Conference, the fact that I spent a few nights showing off my (still bad, but far superior to Hungarian) Italian has only increased my Itali-garian problem, where I try to start a sentence in Hungarian and it comes out partially in Italian. This is only compounded by all the words that sound the same in the two languages but mean completely different things — like io (Italian for “I”) and jó (Hungarian for “good”), both of which sound like the English “yo!”.

Over the past two weeks of Hungarian class, I have continued my role as comic relief by doing the following:

- I attempted to be amusing during a skit and have a line where I asked for a “handsome Hungarian man’s telephone number. Instead, I asked for his telephone bill.

- While describing my trip to Berlin, I said I saw the city’s cathedral. Instead of calling it “very big,” I somehow said it was “very church-y”. When Gabi, the teacher, tried to correct my, I, frustrated, insisted that it was actually quite church-y, saying There was a whole lot of Jesus! Many Jesuses everywhere! until poor Gabi was laughing so hard she relented and agreed that a church could be church-y.

and, my personal favorite…

- we learned the word emlék which means “remembrance”. I was very excited because the word sounded familiar, so I said, in my bad broken Hungarian that I say many signs that had a similar word on historic buildings. When I tried to pronounce the word, I said something like “moo-mel-ake”. Which made Gabi start laughing like crazy. I got flustered and insisted, “No, no — they’re all over Castle Hill! Yes there are lots of them by the castle!”

Apparently, I was trying to say műemlék, which does indeed indicate that a building is of historic importance. But instead I said, műmellek.

Which means “fake breasts.”

Jaj!