A három kedvenc magyar filmem és miért szeretem őket
B2 Hungarian listening practice · Hungarian · Curated for upper-intermediate learners
What does “bakancslista” mean in Hungarian?
Bakancslista is Hungarian for “bucket list”, the things you want to do before you die — and it’s a clever loan-translation, not a literal one. English “kick the bucket” became Hungarian feldobja a bakancsot, “to toss up one’s boots”. So the calque borrowed the boot, not the bucket: bakancs (heavy boot) + lista (list). The result feels native while quietly preserving the morbid joke buried in the original idiom.
It’s a modern word, spread by the 2007 film “The Bucket List”. Compare the cleaner loanword teendők lista (to-do list). In the clip a Hungarian-teacher creator counts down her three favourite Hungarian films and describes one plot where a widowed mother runs a marathon because it was on her late husband’s bakancslista — the exact bittersweet register the word was coined for.