[mootothemax]

I'm a bit surprised by this; as tricky as the Polish language is to e.g. native English speakers, it shares the same sounds as many Slavic languages, plus a fair amount of vocab and grammar basics.

I mean, even though I'm pretty crappy at Polish - my only Slavic language - even I can understand a surprising amount of Russian.

It just seems a bit weird to me that no-one in the Arab coalition spoke Russian and could work backwards from there.

[Swizec]

> I mean, even though I'm pretty crappy at Polish - my only Slavic language - even I can understand a surprising amount of Russian.

As a native speaker of Slovenian, and a passive understander of most southern slavic languages, Russian sounds like people are messing with me. It sounds like I should understand what they're saying, but I really just don't. It sounds familiar and relatable, but it just does not parse outside a few very simple words/phrases. Definitely not enough to even remotely hold a conversation.

It's really quite unnerving.

Same situation as Dutch, I guess. It's so close to a mix between English and German (I'm goot with English, was forced into 4 years of German in high school) that reading/hearing it sounds like I should be able to understand, but it just does not parse.

I hate that feeling.

[TheOtherHobbes]

If you want to feel really confused, visit Portugal.

The soft consonant formations in Portuguese sound bizarrely similar to those in Russian, but grammatically the language has more in common with Italian.

[leaveyou]

The same thing happens with romanian. It sounds a little like russian with italian, french and latin words but the grammar is latin/italian. youtube.com/watch?v=dGK40ykalTw

[mootothemax]

It kinda reminds me of holidaying in India - lots of English speakers, and for the majority I'd be fine understanding them (as a native English speaker), but occasionally would stumble.

My wife's sister was there with us, and her English wasn't so great - and yet she understood everyone.

It kinda seems like if you're still learning a language, you know the pitfalls to expect and understand unexpected pronunciations that bit easier.

[Swizec]

I have definitely noticed that the more time I spend in the US, the worse I am at understanding bad English.

More infuriatingly, I have started making their/there/they're mistakes. I always thought native speakers were just dumb, but damn it, they really do sound exactly the same.

[mootothemax]

Hmm, you know when people say that it's when you start dreaming in a foreign language that you can tell you've started getting there with it? Maybe struggling with bad language use is also a sign?

Fun times with their/there/they're: even if you know you're using the correct one in your head, you can't guarantee that your fingers' muscle memory won't get in the way.

After a particularly exhausting week working with MySQL, I lost the ability to type the word "myself." As soon as I start typing "my", the fingers take over and quickly spit out "mysql".

It's infuriating!

[jacobush]

Definitely can relate. Dutch to me is like - oh, they speak German. No, I don't understand. Ah, it's Danish. No, I don't understand. Gahh!! It also sounds like English, but not really. So I conclude it must be Dutch.

[Zhenya]

I am a fluent Russian speaker and Bulgarian does that to me. It actually makes me feel strangely disoriented.

[nazgob]

This is interesting. As a Polish native speaker I can understand quite well other western Slavic languages (Czech and Slovakian) and I'm not bad with southern Slavic stuff (Croatian etc). But Ukrainian or Russian is quite hard, maybe a word here and there (often with different meaning!).

[V-2]

Belarussian is fairly easy, too - not as close as Slovakian, but somewhat more similar than Russian or Ukrainian. It's rarely heard though, as most of Belarus speaks Russian, especially in cities.

[mootothemax]

Hah, I always think that Ukrainian is just like Polish, albeit spoken with an Italian accent.

(although I know there are plenty of false friends between the two!)

[V-2]

Well, not to me it isn't (native Polish speaker)... Yes I can sort of, kind of, figure out what they're saying, but it's probably 50-60% plus some intelligent "cheating" if the context is clear