@oliver Well.. There are three groups of Slavic languages: East Slavic (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian), Western Slavic (Polish, Slovakian, Czech) and Southern (Serbian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Bosnian). My home language is western Slavic; all of languages from that group use latin alphabet (plus we're not orthodox, but catholic), while eastern ones all use the cyrillic script. Southern is not my niche, so I'll just leave it out for now.
Czech and Slovakian are mutually intelligible, Polish and Slovakian/Czech only partly. Enough to roughtly understand, not enough to not have it sound hilarious for the other side.
Coming back to Russian and Polish. We use a different script, but manyy grammatical structures and some words are borrowed from each other due to the same ancestor of similar heritage of Old Slavic language (from around the 9th century) plus a long history of fighting and bordering each other.
How to compare those two? I guess that Spanish and Portugese would be a decent example. Many foreigners confuse these two (I don't blame them), they sound similar to some extend and you may know a few words in the other language, but it's more of a cultural thing from the Iron Curtain.
alright, i lied about that part of not posting while drunk :X
EDIT: I'm completly sober now, rewrote this message to it actually makes sense.
last edited at Jul 15, 2016 4:21AM