Doing the whole 'backpacking through Eastern Europe thing",

Souns great man, whats your route....
www.travel-with-me.net

English :-)
All national languages can get you in trouble in another country: for example russian in ukraine, croatian in serbia and so on. Simillar languages, but subtile differences can bring you trouble.
Lots of people under 40 will speek at least some English especially in bigger cities.
It might be a good idea to learn some basic frases of serbian/bosnian/croatian/montenegro - basicly te same language in order to understand the locals but avoid speeking.
Forget Hungarian it is different then language in all countries around.
If you want to choose one language, chose the language in the country you want to spend most of your time.

>>1202607
Russian is the way to go. If you understand Russian, you'll be able to read posters/ads in Poland, you'll be able to converse in Belarus, Ukraine, Baltics, Moldova. You'll be able to get the gist of most things in all Slavic countries.

>>1202620
Nobody gets in trouble for speaking Russian in Ukraine - don't listen to this guy.

>>1202607
Why would you want to come here, it's only death and desolation...
If you don't get killed by gangsters, the wild dogs will eat you.

And sure, you might learn 2 or 3 languages before coming here, but people will pick up on your accent.

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415KB, 763x2266px

Did a lot of eastern Europe in 2012 fucking loved it mang, loved Poland, Ukraine, parts of Romania, Slovenia, Hungary Bulgaria coast. Ask me anything you want and I'll try answer, Aussie btw

>>1202623
But learning Russian requires you to learn whole new alphabet, and while this is doable it is additional thing to do.

You won't use Cyrillic alphabet anywhere except Russia and Bulgaria.

I'd go with Polish to be honest.

>>1202607
1st English and 2nd German. As a third one, they like to learn Spanish too. You won't have enough time to learn any Slavic language with their cases and imperfective/perfective stuff

I say Russian, though it's tough.

Young people will generally speak English.

Older people, when they grew up, were forced to learn Russian. So as much as they might absolutely HATE to speak it because of the history behind it, they might understand you.

>>1202762
did u die

>>1202607
Good luck, Slavic languages are a grammatical clusterfuck. You would be aiming for a "me wants buy hamburger" level by July.
Generally, Poles, Slovaks and Czechs understand each other well enough. The other such group is Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians and then Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro. Between these groups it's barely intelligible. Also take note that a lot of mutual intelligibility comes from knowing obscure and archaic words, as well as having a good grasp on all the subtleties of vocab and word formation. Something you can't really hope to learn so quickly.
My advice - don't bother beyond the basic Good Morning/Thank you and maybe a couple other stock phrases. Young people speak English anyway and you won't get any of the languages to a good enough level to avoid confusion. If you do insist on it, go with Russian, it's by far the most useful and widely spoken. The rest is utterly worthless outside of their own countries.

>>1202623
> If you understand Russian, you'll be able to read posters/ads in Poland

lolno

>>1202620
>croatian in serbia
lmao wat. i hope youre talking about accents because its the same fucking language