Mélanie Laurent in Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas, whatever that means. (2006).
(Something like “Don’t worry, I’m fine.”)
I wouldn’t claim to have much talent for it, but I really love European languages, and have studied many, but I really wish I had also taken French in school. It always bewilders me, even though French and English have some common vocab.
Of the languages I did try to learn, the hardest was Hungarian. I made almost zero progress and just gave up on it when I worked in Hungary. There are Hungarians that speak German, English or Russian, but not enough for me to survive there. Fortunately I found a Hungarian girlfriend who speaks German, and she translated for me. Not only is Hungarian from a completely separate language family as the languages I know (Slavic, Romance, Germanic), with almost totally separate vocabulary, but it also incorporates some atypical grammatical practices that make it difficult to construct “on the fly” unless you are a native speaker and do it automatically.
Funny about that – yesterday I just finished reading a series of books about the Eastern Front in WWI and one of the biggest problems the Austro-Hungarians had (among myriads) was that after the first round of idiotic attacks which lost lots of their better officers (the AH commander a total turkey named Conrad und Hotzendorf made Haig look like a genius) there were very few non-Magyar NCOs or midlevel officers who could speak Hungarian. And there was a universal refusal in the Army to learn it because it was simply considered too damn hard.
I don’t know if it is objectively hard. It’s probably simpler than Czech, for example. The problem is that there’s no link between Hungarian and other languages (except Finnish), so there’s no way to get your foot in the door. The structure is different and the vocab is different from the other Euro-tongues, so you have to build everything from scratch.