Unfortunately I have never played a Monster Hunter game before and I have very little idea of what to expect. Is there some way of comparing MH3 to World of Warcraft (which I've played tons of unfortunately)? Thank you.

I've played both WoW and MHFU and I can say that no, there isn't. Try this thread where after I finally got my hands on the demo, and then the full game, I discussed a lot of how the gameplay is and explained some of the basics to some other people as I got to understand them myself. Granted that's the PSP game but the Wii title is like an expansion of the same concepts with certain extra features like underwater areas, fighting, new monsters, graphics, altered AI, armor sets, weapon types, etc. The core of the gameplay is more or less the same.

This tutorial video coupled with some of the information in that thread should be sufficient to get a feel for it:

Great! Thanks a lot, I'll check it out. Monster Hunter 3 sure looks very tempting to say the least.