A language you cannot guess at
Hungarian is not related to the languages around it. It is Finno-Ugric, closer to Finnish than to German, Slovak or anything else on its borders, and it shares almost no vocabulary with them. Travellers who get by elsewhere in Europe by recognising a few roots find none of that works here. A sign, a menu or a ticket machine in Hungarian is genuinely opaque, which makes a camera translation tool more useful in Budapest than in most European capitals.

