Hungarian phrasebook

Hungarian (magyar) is a Uralic, non-Indo-European linguistic island spoken in Central Europe found mainly in Hungary but also in parts of Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. It is surrounded by, but not related to, Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, from which it borrows heavily (the ö, the ü and the knack for combining two-words-in-one from German, the soft sign from Slavs). Its closest relatives are Khanty and Mansi, both spoken in the Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug of Russia. Two of Hungarian's distant relatives, both spoken in Europe, are Finnish and Estonian. It shares the following properties with them:

• There is no grammatical gender.
• The first syllable is almost always stressed (including in borrowed words).
• Vowel and consonant length are distinctive; i.e., the meanings of words change when they are altered.
• Words are marked by case endings ("suffixes") which take on vowels similar to those in the words (e.g., a vonat Budára vagy Pestre közlekedik = the train goes to Buda or Pest). This feature makes Hungarian an agglutinative language.
• The importance of the similarity of vowels is a common aspect among languages which share a feature known as vowel harmony. The rules of vowel harmony are quite complex, but the phenomenon basically consists of vowels produced in the front of the mouth being placed together and vowels produced in the back of the mouth being placed together, with front and back vowels not being used together.

Remember, one difference in pronunciation or vowel length can lead to misinterpretation.