This study first describes the apology strategies used by Hungarian and English native speakers and then investigates how these are exploited by Hungarian learners of English as a foreign language through a questionnaire study. The experiment was conducted to investigate whether Hungarian native EFL learners acquire the English apology strategies or they transfer the Hungarian apology strategies to English. Furthermore, this study set out to explore the similarities and differences between the English and Hungarian apology realisation patterns. The present study compares and contrasts the apology realization patterns in English and Hungarian regarding the strategy use of illocutionary force indicating devices, intensification of IFIDs, the offer of repair, expressing concern, self-strategies, and combinations of strategies. The data was elicited by a discourse completion test. The DCT contained twelve apology situations which were divided into four different categories according to the seriousness of the insult and the social distance between the interlocutors. A total of twenty subjects were included in the experiment, and the study population was predominantly made up of Hungarian native university students.