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What does “belejön” mean in Hungarian?

Belejön is the verb for the moment something stops being hard. Built from bele- (“into”) and jön (“to come”), it means you have come into a skill: nehéz volt belejönni, de belejöttem — “it was hard to get the hang of, but I got there.” Hungarians use it for cooking, new jobs, sports and language learning, and it always implies the difficulty was temporary.

There is a proverb-length version too: belejön, mint kiskutya az ugatásba — “he gets into it like a puppy into barking.” Nearby relatives share the bele- prefix: beletanul valamibe (“to learn one’s way into something”) and belefog (“to set about something”). The speaker here started cooking for her whole family at thirteen or fourteen, admits the early attempts drew a joke from her father, and then sums the whole story up in one word: belejöttem.