[jonbtow]

>> My Spanish has even helped me be able to guess at Italian and Portuguese during travels, where I otherwise would’ve been somewhat lost.

I've witnessed my friend's grandmothers, one who only speaks Italian and the other only Spanish, have full on conversations in their native tongues. I wonder if having conversations in different languages is common in other language families (e.g. indu-aryan languages)?

[kaybe]

We've worked with talking in different languages altogether. They understand German but speak it badly, for me it's the same with French. So I speak German at them and they speak French at me. It works pretty well interestingly.

[magic_beans]

Apparently Slavic languages can be mutually intelligible. My friend who is Russian had a Serbian boyfriend -- both spoke their native languages to each other and were able to more or less understand.

[ryanianian]

Apparently it's pretty common! Stumbled across this list of mutually-ingelligible languages the other day and lost a good few hours on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_intelligibility