That Paul Theroux quote makes sense: Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language, not Indo-European, and in many ways harder to grasp than others you hear in Europe.

Someone said that if translating Romance languages is like doing a crossword puzzle, translating Hungarian is like trying to solve a Rubik's cube. It's painful that my father didn't speak it to us as children (only to his mother and sister), because it would be so much harder to learn now.