Carol Rounds

Professor Rounds is a wonderful teacher. She breaks complex things down to be very understandable. She truly cares about each student. Classes are small (mine was three students total) so much of class time is dedicated to practicing speaking to each other and going through exercises. Compared to other language courses I've taken, I learned a lot very fast from this course without a heavy workload or tons of stress. Professor Rounds makes learning a new language enjoyable and fairly easy.

I would recommend this class, but with caution. The clear bright side is that Carol Rounds is an awesome professor. She explain hard concepts (all of which border on grammatical witchcraft) in Hungarian well, although the inherent difficultly of Hungarian grammar makes this a difficult class at times. I would immediately recommend this to any person in Carol's Hungarian language classes, as it's good review of what you've covered and good prep for what your about to see. (I saw the past tense in this class before I saw it in Elementary II.) For all others, it's going to take you a lot of review of her packets out of class to know what's going on.

Professor Rounds is an astonishing one-woman department. She's literally the only Professor of Hungarian in the Ivy League and NYU - and teaches students from a number of different institutions here at Columbia. Her passion for Hungarian is so obvious in everything she does, and she has such a wealth of knowledge. Seriously, you can ask her anything and 99% of the time she has an answer! I found her to be extremely personable, especially because the class sizes for Hungarian are so small (who's even taking Hungarian?) so you get to build sincere relationships with her and your classmates.

Assignments due roughly every other class, once you understand what she wants they're not that bad. Midterm presentation- comparison of Hungarian grammatical structure of choice with another language. Final, which was sort of a homework on steroids.

Professor Rounds is an absolutely top notch language teacher. Not only is she a great teacher, but she is a preeminent expert in Hungarian grammar, and is also quite knowledgeable about its history and culture. You couldn't ask for better. I have studied French and Spanish before with various teachers, and while I definitely have had some good (and not-so-great) language teachers in the past, Carol Rounds is by far the most adept at teaching language in an intuitive and engaging manner. I am taking Hungarian as part of the separate language requirement for the Linguistics special major, but this semester the other three students in the class have previous experience with Hungarian (from their Hungarian parents, etc.). Even with this mixture of backgrounds and differing levels prior experience, the class runs pretty much seamlessly. What I really love about her class is the intuitive way each lesson builds upon the last. Hungarian has quite a few aspects that can be confusing to the English speaker at first (cases, grammatical agreement depending on the definiteness/indefiniteness of the direct object, etc.) but Professor Rounds introduces them in a stepwise manner that ensures you have mastered the basis of each grammatical concept before moving on to grammar that builds upon those concepts. From the perspective of a linguistics major, this is especially satisfying (because re…

*The best foreign language instruction I've ever received* Carol is knowledgeable, accomodating, and very passionate about Hungary and its native tongue. As the previous reviewer mentioned, the class tends to be very small, and the individual attention means much more speaking time in-class than is typical of foreign language courses. This semester she has gone out of her way (taking obscenely early trains from Jersey) to meet at a time when all interested students from last semester were conflict-free. Plus, hey, she wrote the book (literally, she authored the text), and her grammatical explanations are extremely digestable. If you're looking for incredible instruction in one of Europe's oldest languages, take Hungarian with Carol Rounds.

Carol is friendly, approachable, responsive, talented, and a wonderful teacher. Because very few people are interested in taking Hungarian, the classes are small and thus very personal. You get to know Carol and your classmates pretty well. For nearly individual instruction learning a very interesting language, this course is exceptional, and Carol is wonderful.

carol is the most wonderful instructor i have ever had at columbia. she says elementary hungarian is her favorite class to teach, and it shows. she has such a love for the language, which she passes on, and she presents all the lessons so that the language seems logical and sensible. she has more patience than anyone i've ever known, and doesn't mind if you keep making the same mistake -- she'll gently remind you every time. she's always enthusiastic, cheerful, encouraging, and energetic despite a 2-hour commute to a 9 a.m. class. and she's been teaching hungarian for years and years, so she knows the best way to explain every grammar point, knows what will trip students up, and isn't surprised when you don't catch on for another 2 weeks. hungarian may be a hard language but i wouldn't know -- in this class, i just thought it was fun.