This article is the first variationist analysis of speakers
of an analytic language acquiring an agglutinative language:
we investigate the acquisition of the rich Hungarian verbal
morphological system by adult Chinese immigrants to Budapest.
Multivariate analyses of data extracted from sociolinguistic
interviews with nine untutored Chinese learners of Hungarian
suggest that the acquisition of verbal morphology is systematic.
Factors that have been identified as significant in studies
of the acquisition of other languages, such as frequency,
perceptual salience, morphophonological regularity, and semantic
complexity, all play a significant role in the acquisition of
Hungarian as a second language. The marking of definiteness
or indefiniteness of the object on the verb, a rare aspect of
verbal morphology, also has a significant effect. Chinese learners
are more likely to mark definite than indefinite forms of the
verb, despite the fact that these forms express largely redundant
functions and that indefinites are more frequent. Hence, our
data allow for an analysis of relative weights of factors affecting
acquisition and address the issue of the relative weight of
frequency over other factors.