[29athrowaway]

This is a song in Ladino. Ask any person fluent in Spanish if they can understand it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t2NYMTs_20

To me, a fluent Spanish speaker, it sounds like a Spanish person with a foreign accent.

The pronunciation and grammar sounds a little bit off (with respect to Spanish), but otherwise I can understand this 100%.

[pjmlp]

Same here, and if you speak German, the same applies to Yiddish.

[yorwba]

LibriVox has recordings of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" translated into many languages, including various Germanic ones. https://librivox.org/the-raven-multilingual-by-edgar-allan-p...

As a native German speaker who also knows English (obviously), I'd rate the comprehensibility of the others as follows:

Swedish: understood just a few words

Dutch: understood some entire phrases

Yiddish: understood entire sentences, but there were still some words I couldn't recognize, which I guess might stem from Hebrew or Slavic languages. (But I did know about some of the more regular sound changes relative to German before, like Augen → Äugen.)

[kettro]

Importantly, there is a difference between comprehension and production. Just because you can mostly understand a language, doesn't mean that it isn't a language in its own right. Yiddish, as an example, has many syntactic differences from German, in addition to its differing vocabulary.

Scots is absolutely a different language from English, despite it being intelligible. I can't produce that speech, even with an accent. It has different rules and formations that My English just doesn't have.

[29athrowaway]

Yes, it's true. There are unique words in Ladino that a Spanish speaker won't be able to identify, but my main takeaway is that modern Spanish and Ladino are mutually intelligible.