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Whenever I visit a foreign country I always try to learn at least a few words in the local language, even if it's just basic greetings and simple stuff like that.
In preparation for my trip to Romania a few years ago, I learned some Romanian. I also spoke enough French and German to get by in most of the countries we visited on the way (driving across Europe). However, I was at a complete loss in Hungary since I didn't speak a word of the language and most of the Hungarians I met on that trip didn't seem to speak any of the languages I did know (since I was in their country I couldn't really blame them for that).
For my trip to Hungary earlier this month I made an effort to learn some Hungarian before I went. It is a truly fascinating language, with a not entirely unjustified reputation for being difficult. One thing that makes it challenging and interesting is that it is completely unrelated to any of its neighbouring languages and in fact it isn't an Indo-European language at all, so both the grammar and vocabulary are considerably different. Apparently it is fairly closely related to Finnish (although the two aren't mutually intelligible), and both are members of the Finno-Ugric language family.
Here are some of my thoughts on particularly interesting features of the language. The Wikipedia article on Hungarian has a lot more detail if you want some further reading.
Hungarian is an agglutinative language, meaning that it uses lots of prefixes and suffixes to convey grammatical meaning and often strings several words together into one compound word to convey more precise meaning. It doesn't use any prepositions but has a whole bunch of different cases (about 20, I think) which perform a similar function. For example Budapesten means "in Budapest" (superessive case), while Budapestre means "to Budapest" (sublative case).
Another characteristic feature of Hungarian, shared with some other languages (including Turkish, I think), is vowel harmony, whereby the vowels in the grammatical suffices are chosen to match the vowels in the word stem. For example, kések is "knives", while sajtok is "cheeses", with plural endings -ek and -ok respectively.
Incidentally, Hungarian has no concept of grammatical gender, which I find a refreshing change from other languages where it just seems to be an unnecessary complication.
In case you're wondering, the title of this blog post means "the weather is fine". It was one of the first Hungarian phrases I learned though, to my great regret and despite the good weather we had for most of the trip, I didn't get round to using it while I was there.
To finish with, here's a phrase that any good Hungarian phrasebook
should include:
A légpárnás hajóm tele van
angolnával - My hovercraft is full of eels.
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