Of all the languages I speak, the one people are most curious/surprised by Hungarian. Sometimes I answer that I did that as a part of a campaign to study all Habsburg languages, which is in a way true; but the real reason begins with one word I heard in the Budapest metro:

I couldn& #39;t figure out what word followed the name of each station. It turned out to be következik. The dictionary taught me that it was a transitive verb követ & #39;to follow& #39; made reflexive by the suffix -kezik: következik & #39;to follow, to result from& #39;. A quick Google search followed:

If you add the suffix -tet, which makes a verb causative, you get következtet: "to infer" ("to make something result from"), just like keres means to search and kerestet to make someone search. Oddly, it turned out that bűn & #39;sin& #39; does not become büntet & #39;to make someone sin& #39;, but:

instead, it meant büntet & #39;to punish& #39;. I also learned that the suffix -és turns a verb into a noun, so következés was "succession, sequence, order" and that -képpen is a suffix that turns it into an adverb: következésképpen is consequently, like büntetésképpen = as a punishment:

By the end of my trip, I was addicted. I could explain why egészségedre & #39;Cheers!& #39; is actually "to your health", and even more literally "to your being whole"; viszontlátásra & #39;goodbye& #39; is actually "to seeing [each other] again":

I refused abbreviations like viszlát, taking pride in the long words I learned to decode. Then, inadvertently, it became useful as I made the switch from Ottoman-Russian history to "Habsburg in Eurasia" History.