Érettségi Latin common mistakes
Érettségi Latin · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
When translating a continuous prose passage, the candidate renders every ablative absolute as a plain 'with/by' phrase and leaves the participle agreeing with nothing in the Hungarian sentence, e.g. turning 'His rebus cognitis Caesar...' into 'Ezekkel a dolgokkal megismertetve...' instead of a temporal or causal clause.
The candidate learned the ablative absolute as a vocabulary item ('with X having been Y-ed') rather than as a clause-equivalent construction, so they translate word-by-word left to right and never decide what the participle's logical subject is or how Hungarian should express it (amikor/miután/mivel + finite verb).
What to do instead
Before translating, bracket each participial phrase, underline the participle, and write above it the case/number/gender of its noun and the tense of the participle. Then choose one of four Hungarian renderings (időhatározó, okhatározó, feltételes, módhatározó) and write a finite verb with an explicit subject. Practise on ten short sentences where the same phrase is rendered as 'miután', 'mivel', 'ha' and 'úgy, hogy' to see the range.
In verse translation the candidate ignores the metre and elision and translates a hexameter line as if it were prose word order, producing a Hungarian sentence that misassigns adjectives to the wrong nouns, especially where a hyperbaton separates them (e.g. adjective at line start, noun at line end).
School prose practice trains scanning left to right; verse word order is deliberately interlaced, and elision (e.g. 'multum ille et terris') removes syllables the candidate expects, so the candidate latches onto the nearest noun rather than the grammatically agreeing one.
What to do instead
Read the line aloud, mark the ictus and all elisions, then draw agreement arrows from every adjective, participle and relative pronoun to its head noun before translating anything. Re-read the whole sentence in Latin first and only then write Hungarian, keeping the Latin clause order in a rough draft and reordering afterwards.
The candidate identifies a verb form by its ending alone, confusing future perfect active ('amaverit') with perfect subjunctive, or present subjunctive passive ('ametur') with future indicative, and then mistranslates the whole subordinate clause.
Textbooks present paradigms in separate tables, and candidates memorise endings in isolation without the stem and without the syntax that disambiguates them; examination passages deliberately use ambiguous forms where only the conjunction or sequence of tenses decides.
What to do instead
For every ambiguous verb, apply a two-step test: (1) identify stem and conjugation from the infinitive, (2) check the introducing word (ut, cum, si, ne, dum) and the tense of the main verb to fix sequence of tenses. Keep a personal list of homograph pairs (amaverit, amaveris, ametur, amabitur) and write one sentence for each meaning.
When a sentence contains indirect speech (accusative and infinitive, or 'ut' + subjunctive after verbs of ordering), the candidate translates the accusative as a direct object and produces a sentence like 'Azt mondta a királyt megölni' instead of 'Azt mondta, hogy a királyt megölték'.
Hungarian has no accusative-and-infinitive construction, so the candidate has no native model to map onto and defaults to treating the accusative as the object of the reporting verb; the tense of the infinitive (present for same time, perfect for prior time) is also routinely ignored.
What to do instead
Train a mechanical rewrite: find the verb of saying/thinking, cut the sentence there, insert 'hogy', make the accusative the Hungarian subject, and convert the infinitive to a finite verb whose tense follows the infinitive (present infinitive = same time, perfect infinitive = earlier, future infinitive = later). Do ten transformations from direct to indirect speech and back.
The candidate translates case functions by a fixed Hungarian equivalent (genitive always 'of', dative always 'to/for', ablative always 'with'), so that genitivus subiectivus/obiectivus, dativus possessivus, and ablativus comparationis or ablativus temporis come out as nonsense.
Early declension drills pair each case with one English preposition, and candidates never replace that crutch with a function-based checklist; Hungarian case endings do not map one-to-one onto Latin ones.
What to do instead
Build a one-page case-function checklist (genitive: birtokos, alanyeset-értelmező, 'of' after verbs of remembering/filling; dative: részes, birtokos, cél, 'with' after certain adjectives; ablative: eszköz, mód, idő, összehasonlítás, ok, hely). For each noun in a passage, name the function in Hungarian before writing the translation.
The candidate answers culture and civilisation questions from general knowledge about Rome and ignores the specifically Hungarian framing of the exam, e.g. cannot name the Hungarian Latin-language authors or the Hungarian reception of a set text, or confuses the Hungarian names of Roman institutions with their Latin ones.
Candidates prepare from international websites and English-language summaries, while the exam's culture and reception questions are tied to the Hungarian textbook canon (Janus Pannonius, Bálint Balassi's Latin, the 'res gestae' tradition in Hungarian historiography).
What to do instead
Make a two-column glossary: Latin term / Hungarian term and Hungarian author / Latin work, covering the set authors and the institutions named in the exam description. Check each culture fact against a Hungarian-language source and note the Hungarian name alongside the Latin.
The candidate translates a set lexical item or idiom word-for-word, producing literal nonsense: 'rem publicam gerere' as 'to do the public thing' rather than 'to govern the state', 'operam dare' as 'to give work', 'bellum gerere' as 'to do war'.
Vocabulary is learned as single-word glosses from a word list, and multi-word units are never stored as units; the candidate recognises each word and assumes the sum of meanings is the meaning.
What to do instead
Keep an idiom notebook organised by head verb (gerere, dare, facere, habere, ferre) with the full phrase and one Hungarian equivalent plus one original Latin sentence using it. Revise by covering the Hungarian and producing the whole Latin phrase, not the individual words.
On morphology questions the candidate gives the principal parts or the declension of an irregular noun from memory but slips on quantity or on the ablative singular, e.g. writing 'domu' for 'domo', or giving 'fero, ferre, tuli, latum' with a wrong supine, or declining 'vis' as a regular i-stem.
Irregulars are memorised once early and never revisited, and the exam asks for them in isolation where context cannot help; quantity marks are ignored because Hungarian does not distinguish vowel length in the same way.
What to do instead
Maintain a short irregular list (esse, posse, ferre, velle, nolle, malle, ire, fieri; vis, domus, Iuppiter, bos) and test yourself by writing the full paradigm including genitive plural and ablative singular, marking long vowels. Recite the principal parts aloud with stress on the quantity.
When analysing sentence structure the candidate labels any 'cum' clause as temporal and any 'ut' clause as purpose, missing concessive 'cum' with tamen, explanatory 'ut', and result 'ut' with correlatives (ita, tam, tantus), and so mistranslates the logical relation between clauses.
The first-listed meaning in the dictionary is memorised as the only meaning, and the candidate does not look for the signals (tamen, ita, sic, non dubito quin) that disambiguate the conjunction.
What to do instead
Learn each conjunction as a decision tree: for 'cum', check for tamen (concessive), for a historical present/perfect main verb (narrative cum), for a characterizing adjective (explanatory); for 'ut', check for a correlative in the main clause (result) versus a verb of asking/ordering (purpose or indirect command). Apply the tree to every clause before translating.
The candidate translates the historical infinitive and the poetic plural or poetic archaism as literal present-tense narrative, and reads mythological allusions in verse as ordinary description, producing a translation that is grammatically possible but culturally wrong.
Historical infinitive looks like a normal present infinitive, and verse passages are read without the mythographic background the exam expects; the candidate has not been trained to recognise allusion as a translation problem.
What to do instead
Flag every infinitive in a narrative passage and test whether its subject is nominative and the main verb absent; if so, render as past tense. For verse, before translating, write a one-line note on each proper name and epithet identifying the mythological or historical referent, and check whether the epithet is conventional (e.g. 'pius Aeneas') rather than descriptive.