This chart shows the "lexical distance" among European languages. As you can see, Hungarian is in a class of its own in far right field. While it falls within the Finno-Urgic family, Hungarian and Finnish, for example, are not mutually intelligible. If you look in the bottom right at the Slavic family I'm told that many of those languages are mutually intelligible, at least to some extent.
Each language I've studied has its virtues and vices. At least with Hungarian you can always count on consistent pronunciation of letters. On the other hand, the use of suffixes for parts of speech make it difficult to remember as each word and sentence roll off your tongue.
This was posted on a linguistic site in 2008 and there doesn't seem to be anyone disagreeing with it in the comments. Do you see problems? Here's the link to the full site.
Cheers to renewing my study of Hungarian in this new year!
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