[Part of this post is taken from the Duolingo Hungarian Tips & Notes ]

The Hungarian alphabet

Hungarian uses the Latin alphabet (abcd) with some additional letters and diacritics (accent marks).

Let's start with the vowels.

Vowels can be short and long. Short vowels are a, e, i, o, u, ö and ü. Their long versions are á, é, í, ó, ú, ő and ű.

Consonants can also be short and long. Consonants become long by doubling them, as in reggel ’morning’.

If a digraph or a trigraph (a letter that consists of two or three characters) becomes long, we don't write it down twice, but shorten it:

sz + sz = ssz, cs + cs = ccs, zs + zs = zzs

dinnye [watermelon] consist of diny+nye. The long 'ny' is 'nny'. (A long 'dzs' is 'ddzs' but you won't see this often.)

Some English consonants are spelled differently in Hungarian:

Letter	Hungarian pronunciation	IPA
c	like ts in cats	[t͡s]
cs	like ch in channel	[t͡ʃ]
s	like sh in shower	[ʃ]
sz	like s in sing	[s]
zs	like s in pleasure	[ʒ]
gy	no English equivalent	[ɟ]
ny	like gn in lasagne	[ɲ]
ty	like t in Tuesday (British pronunciation)	[c]
dzs	like j in jump	[d͡ʒ]

So Hungarian szia (’hello’ or ’goodbye’) sounds like English see ya!

The letters gy, ny, ty are sounds which not all varieties of English have. They sound a bit like adding a y sound to the preceding sound.

Don't forget that these di- and trigraph letters aren't pronounced consonant by consonant, they represent ONE sound.

Keep in mind that sz and cs are completely distinct sounds - the same applies for gy and zs.

Hungarians think of these multigraphs as ONE letter.

gy and ty are especially problematic for learners, here is a video about pronouncing GY, from Gellért

Magyar Bagoly