Hi Mark,
Good luck with the Hungarian advanture. Budapest is a beautiful city, I lived there long ago for nine months, and enjoyed it very much. The Hungarian culture is rich, there are many beautiful things to visit. One good thing is I that the pronouciation of hungarian is quit straightforward, and very rythmic. I think it is not ugly at all. Vowel harmony is not difficult at all, just one thing to do that if it is a -a, -o, -u you have one type of endings and in the other case the other. Nothing mysterious.
Enjoy your stay!
Silvia
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I don’t think Hungarian sounds ugly at all. What strikes me is the “sh” sound. It seems like a very “shushy” language 
@silviad, thanks for the encouragement.
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Imy, I’m not quite sure what to say to that
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I studied Hunagrian for the last 3 years… though now I put it a bit aside as I am focusing on my Dutch and my Russian. But I keep on reading in Hungarian and my passive knowledge is solid, I read classic literature in Hungarian.
Personally, I consider that the most difficult thing in hungarian is that they use a lot of different words for the same ideas. They have many synonyms and all of them are used often in the language.
Some words also have changes that are even very difficult to understand in their meaning for a non-Hungarian… I remembered one day one of my Hungarian friends trying to explain to me why Hungarians have 3 words for “Dawn” depending on the light and so on… :DD
It is sometimes frustrating because even if you learn a lot of words, they will use another one just for pleasure, and you’ll be confused.
Another element is also that the order of the words is very loose… grammatical functions are showed by endings and so Hungarians tend to put words in the order they prefer. They will try to explain to you there are rules, but traveling there, I realized this order is different depending on the regions… so I would say for a non-Hungarian it’s pretty much like if there was no strict system.
This leads to the fact that it’s very difficult to anticipate what is said. In other languages, the order of words allows your brain to create structures giving you the possibility to know in advance how something should/could be said. In Hungarian, it is not like this and it’s quite complex…
However, there are some elements that are easier. For example, they have only 3 major tenses. So all happening in the past is said the same way, which is easy if you compare to how many tenses there are in French for the past. The pronunciation is also quite easy with strict rules and not so many exceptions. There are also no genders, so easier to remembeer how to use words.
I studied using the Assimil. Later I just started reading Hungarian books and newspaper. I didn’t find any other valuable source of teaching for Hungarian as it is a language that is not a favourite. After 3 years, I read very well and can aprticipate in normal conversations. However, I do not understand things such as TV news and other complicated speech. As I am not practicing a lot in those days, my active knowledge is a bit hibernating right now… but I am not worrying too much because I always understand everything when I read, so I know the whole stuff will come back to my mind the day I will decide to go into Hungarian again… which will happen after I finished Dutch and Russian I guess
@ Bortrun :
Assimil is probably a good idea. A good resource on the web is www.magyarora.com. There you can find a lot of written and spoken texts, colloquial Hungarian too, with grammatical explanations and exercises (see bottom of their homepage). The authors wrote 2 books (bilingual Hungarian-English) you can easily find in Budapest, where there is a bookshop on every street corner!
In Budapest, I suggest you to attend some course at the Debrecen Summer School (despite the name, they organize courses the whole year through!) www.nyariegyetem.hu/bp/
Two things are difficult in Hungarian: the order of the words (see Laurent’s post) and, in a fluent conversation, the correct use of objective and subjective conjugation, which is a particularity that doesn’t exist in any other language, as far as I know.
Hm…sounds interesting I have met with some people who lived in Hungary but they never said it’s an ugly language I tried to teach them 
Now…here is a student from Spain , lives close to me and she said hungarian is a very rhythmic language and good to hear.However she said that Spanish people are louder
Yeah thats suprising when foreign people speak Hungarian because who wants to learn Hungarian.It’s not a world language.
I’m very happy when people want or try to learn my language.
It’s pity that lot of people think hungarian is a difficult language. :-/
Difficult or not, I’d love to learn it in the future. There’s a rich literary tradition available that makes it more than worthwhile IMO.
I watched a documentary on the 1956 Budapest uprising last night, and was reminded how cool and beautiful spoken Hungarian is.
oh it’s so good to hear if you need any help I’m here :-))
I regret that, in the end, I didn’t study Hungarian while I was there. I was in Budapest for 6 months, but I was working on a project with other English-speakers, and I spoke to my girlfriend in Japanese, so there just wasn’t really an opportunity to fit Hungarian in. If I get a chance to go back though, I’ll try to make a go of it. I really like the sound of Hungarian.
Hello-
I am currently learning Hungarian as well. Currently, I have Teach Yourself, Assimil, and Colloquial. These three resources are very good so far. They all incorporate different methods of learning, and I feel doing all 3 together is really strengthening my learning.
it sounds great. Teach Yourself is a useful bok series there is maybe Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur I haven’t tried because I’m hungarian. Good Luck!
I also really like the sound and rhythm of Hungarian. It’s a unique and fascinating language from a linguistic perspective. I definitely want to learn it in the (near) future.
wow…I haven’t thought that people want to learn Hungarian.Most of people don’t know where Hungary is I’m glad that here are people who like Hungarian.
Why don’t you all Hungarian-lovers start gathering votes for Hungarian on the LingQ beta language poll? This is the url: https://www.facebook.com/questions/10150249705278786/
If you all get as active as I’ve been for Romanian in the last couple of months, Hungarian could become a new LingQ language pretty soon!