French "ai" is the same as "é", at least according to standard proncunciation, the way people actually pronounce those two is another matter (plus it also depends on the surrounding sounds soo..). Like in maison, it's /ɛ/ etc...but e.g. in the futur simple forms it's pronounced /e/. (The truth is that in contemporary northern (as opposed to southern where they like to keep things more traditional, at least pronunciation-wise) French pronunciation the ending of the first person singular futur and conditionnel forms merged to make a sound somewhere between the two so je ferai and je ferais are roughly pronounced the same.)
Here is some of what I found on Hungarian phonology and they all describe our "e" as /ɛ/. Are they all wrong? (Plus apparently I lived a lie for the last couple of years .)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_phonology
http://www.search.com/reference/Hungarian_phonology
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hungarian.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_f ... nded_vowel
http://www.speech.kth.se/prod/publicati ... 08-012.pdf
I also listened to a recording of an open-mid front unrounded vowel and it's very much like what I'd describe our "e" to be.
As for your question about the distinction of "flash" and "flesh": picked it up.