Hungarian phrasebook

Hungarian is a spoken in a linguistic island around Hungary (Hungary, parts of Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine and Serbia); it is surrounded by Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages, none of which it is related to. Two of Hungarians relatives, both spoken in Europe, are Finnish and Estonian. It shares with them the following properties:

-There is no grammatical gender.
-The first syllable is always stressed.
-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). 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 it basically consists of "front" vowels being placed with "front" vowels and "back" vowels placed with "back".

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