Well, Magyar is fiendishly difficult. I knew French and German before learning polski and it still was very difficult, yet I couldn’t find any linkages in Magyar. Completely alien.
So this lass would be right to be unhappy that people in a cafe in Budapest don’t speak Magyar
You didn’t find any linkages because Magyarul is a finno-ugraic language. Its only relative is Finnish and that relationship is distant. Its not even Indo-European. The only other I know of in Europe that is not Indo-European is Basque which is a stone age language that somehow survived.
Hungarian is tough to learn and has really crazy rules of grammar I’ve seen nowhere else and I speak German fluently and I really suck at French and Spanish but I’m fairly familiar with both so I have a basis for comparison.
Actually I found it fairly easy to get around in Poland, I tried to speak Polish whenever I could, it’s actually not difficult to achieve “Tourist Level Polish”. But yes, Hungarian is a whole other story.
Hungarian (Magyar) is a Finno-Ugric language distantly related to Finnish, Estonian, Sami (Lapp), and some isolated indigenous languages of the Russian Far North. All of the other languages you mentioned, as well as English, are from the Indo-European language family and will have mutual cognates, most commonly showing similarities between basic words like numbers, colors, animals, foods, and familial relationships. Between the Finno-Ugric and Indo-European language families, however, there is not even the most trivial connection, other than loan-words from the modern era.