The Hungarian course was created by a group of volunteer contributors. You might have heard about the Duolingo Incubator, where people were able to apply to help creating courses for the language-pairs they already speak.
When the Incubator was created (9th of October 2013), first only courses teaching English/Spanish/French/German/Italian/Portuguese were possible. The so-called "big six".
A group of Hungarians applied to create the "English for Hungarian speakers" course. Abenhakan, Nitram, Boringtomi, SzeAndr, Adam1978, and a few other people... I don't know the whole team, I was not there :P
This team translated a given English language template to Hungarian (and also the interface!) They started on 2013-11-15 and entered Beta on 2014-01-08 (that is surprisingly quick, only 54 days! ) and the course graduated from Beta on 2014-12-10.
It was not the very first community-created course, that title goes to "English for Russian speakers" which was released on 2013-12-19.
Yeah, I use https://duolingo.fandom.com/wiki/Course_list to check these dates.
Sometime during 2014, Duolingo tweaked the Incubator, and teaching new languages became possible. Well, as long as they use the Latin alphabet. (Plus the Russian course). Duo was still far away from teaching Japanese or Chinese at this point. But for the Hungarian team it meant that they could start working on the reverse course: teaching Hungarian! They started working on this on 2014-03-12. What happened next? You can find out if you read all the Incubator updates here: https://incubator.duolingo.com/courses/hu/en/status. I read them all, it is a long and fascinating story.
In short, the team decided not to follow a given "skeleton" of an existing course, but instead, build the whole course from scratch.
Boringtomi had a book: “Erdős, Kozma, Prileszky, Uhrman - Hungarian in Words and Pictures” (published in 1990). The book has 25 chapters, and the team decided to do the first 10 chapters and then send the course to Beta.
But following a book is not always a good idea. This book introduces the Accusative case only in chapter 9 (together with the definite conjugation), while "A fák a mellett a ház mellett vannak, amelyikbe az orvos megy" (The trees are next to that house, in which the doctor goes) appears in Chapter 6. If you struggled your way through the infamous Dir Conj 1.2.3 skills, blame this chapter...
The team got stuck at some point, some of the team members left, new people joined... Finally in 2016, AndrsBrny and woolfool made a great effort, moved the accusative earlier, added past tense, added Time &Date, and finished the course and sent it to Beta. 2016-06-30 is the big birthday.
As I heard, communication with Duolingo staff was not easy back in the day. The green contributors did not know that if they turn into gold contributors, they can remove and add sentences in a live tree. There was a plain wrong Hungarian sentence in the first skill, and for a while they could not remove it.
Later they found out how to do it, and removed some of the problematic sentences.
AndrsBrny, fmk64 and danleighton also made fixes to turn the Hunglish-English translations into better English.
Then the course graduated from beta on ...
Okay, I am just kidding, it never graduated from Beta. Maybe the super-long sentences did not help so much.
But another nice event happened: I joined the team :) In April 2018. I went through a lot of sentences and added alternative translations. My goal was to make the translations more consistent throughout the course.
Something still annoyed us... the structure of the course is not very beginner-friendly. So we planned to create a new version, a so-called Tree 2.
Actually, daKanga (a moderator and a contributor for the Greek course) helped me to get it started... in February 2019, the new version appeared in the incubator.
In 2019, mainly I worked on it alone, but starting from January 2020, we had weekly online meetings with Adrienn, designing the new tree. She is actually a Hungarian teacher (unlike me). If 2020 was good for something, that's having online meetings with people. Around October 2020, Zsóka and Floralili also joined us for these meetings.
During this time, we started another project. I have dreamed about having a German from Hungarian course ever since I joined Duolingo. I heard a German from Dutch speakers course was being created... so it is possible to request cross-courses!
I asked the staff nicely on Slack: Hey, we have a team of experienced contributors, and we would like to make a DE from HU course. They greenlighted it in March 2020 (when the quarantine time started). I invited a bunch of new team members, and we translated the German from Dutch course into Hungarian. It was released in March 2021.
This came as a shock, but luckily, 4 former contributors were hired as contractors, so we can continue working on the courses.
All in all, Duolingo created an amazing tool 7 years ago, which gave life to so many new courses. There are 103 available courses now!
About the HU - EN course, I would like to give a big thank you to the following people:
boringtomi, Nitram, Abenhakan, radnaitomi, Sztadi, SzeAndr, suncedli, sch.fanni, SD-77 et al. -The original team who created the Hungarian course (boringtomi had the book they based it on...)
AndrsBrny, woolfool - made a huge effort to push the course to Beta in 2016
DonaldKron - who spent a lot of time going through name translations... sure, the team later decided that names should not be translated, and all those edits were reversed
ipattorneyliza - our first alpha tester
fmk64 - after the release, he edited awful English translations into okay English ones
danleighton - a native English speaker and educator, helped a lot with English
rdhelli - a moderator and a contributor for a while
andortenisz - also a contributor for some time
AdriennPle - language teacher, we talked a lot and designed Tree 2 together
vvsey - the absolute expert in answering grammar questions on the forum
MissSpells and MrtonPolgr- checking reports and making the accepted translations more consistent
blghzsk - language teacher, has the superpower to write 100 new sentences in a week
floralili - a linguist, helped building Tree 2
AndrsBrny once more - a linguist, and he stayed with the Hungarian course after all this time
BigWayne19 - helped by checking the Tips and Notes and making them better English
plus, outside of the team, but a big thank you to Judit294350, peter.kristof.hu and Kati673185 for answering questions on the forum
Kru kru!
(This is owl-language for "You are amazing".)
UPDATE: In December 2022, the Hungarian course finally left Beta. It only took 6 and a half years :)
UPDATE 2: In April/May 2023, the new version of the course (Tree 2) was released to users.
Extra links:
2013-11-13
a post by Luis,
Now in beta: Learning English from German!
English for German speakers released: the first language made in the Incubator by Duolingo staff https://archive.ph/2nlY7
2013-12-19
a post by Luis,
The First Language Course has been Incubated. English from Russian is now available in beta!
the first incubated course created by volunteers: English for Russian speakers https://archive.fo/
Hungarian for English - suddenly at 76%?
https://magyarbagoly.blogspot.com/2022/02/hungarian-for-english-suddenly-at-76.html
https://archive.ph/AXvx4
a post by Nitram, encouraging people to join the incubator, [in Hungarian]
https://archive.ph/cK13Z
post by Abenhakan, looking for contributors [in Hungarian]
https://archive.ph/6ckVt
------------------------------------
Other interesting posts:
daKanga's post: Incubator stories
https://archive.ph/Mz7ZY
davidvdb's post about the Hungarian course: https://archive.ph/MoQtx
the oldest surviving Duolingo forum message (about Spanish) by Luis
https://archive.ph/qoiYl
Dec 13, 2011
Tree 2, first post https://archive.ph/ubK2a
Any updates on the new Hungarian Tree?
https://archive.ph/gEmXE
We changed some skill names
https://archive.ph/ylBpN
New tree information, 2021 August
https://archive.ph/WMPcS
The story of the Hungarian course
https://archive.ph/GqwIu
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