Here in Scandinavia we can communicate pretty easily, I could probably hold a normal conversation with someone speaking swedish or norwegian while I speak danish.
Do any other countries have this sort of thing or is it just us?
To clarify I know eastern european countries are gonna have an easy time on this. But it would still be interesting to find out.
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Depends on the neighbor country.
* Czech Republic and Slovakia? Kinda. I mean, there are many false friends, but in extreme situations you might be able to communicate with them because Polish, Czech and Slovak are Western Slavic languages.
* Ukraine? Belarus? Russia? Maybe… I work in a pharmacy in eastern Poland and from time to time I have patients who speak Eastern Slavic languages and if they don’t speak Polish to me, sometimes I understand and sometimes I don’t. Just because Polish and e.g. Russian are Slavic languages doesn’t mean that I as a native Polish speaker can understand someone who speaks Russian. There are times when someone is telling me something in Russian and I’m standing there and I say in Polish “I’m sorry, I don’t understand”.
* Germany? Nope.
* Lithuania? Definitely no.
Not with Germans, altough Dutch and German form a dialect continuum and Eastern Dutch Low Saxon dialects and Low German are to some extend mutual intelligible.
With the Flemish we can of course. They speak Dutch, although they have a very funny accent.
It depends.
Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro – absolutely. Despite some differences, our languages are almost the same.
Slovenia – it’s possible, but harder than with countries I mentioned before. Also, I’ve noticed that Slovenians understands Croatian better than we understand Slovenian (which makes sense for people who were raised in Yugoslavia as they had to learn Croato-Serbian in school)
Hungary – not at all, it’s completely different language, it doesn’t even belong to the same group of languages.
Italy – no, but in dialects in Dalmatia and Istria we use a lot of Italian words. However, it’s easy for me as I have been studying Italian for more than a decade so I just speak it with Italians.
No, with any of them. But this is the Balkans so even if we did spoke the same language, we’d still not be able to communicate in any meaningful way.
We can understand them, but they can’t understand us (unless they’re galician, in which case we can understand eachother).
In Austria, definitely not.
In France, I found people in Nice who understood Italian (of course, it’s just over the border and many Italians go there on holiday, but there weren’t any native speakers), but in general no (keep in mind that France is a vast country, and it’s unlikely that anyone in Paris will know Italian just because of the common border between the two countries).
In Slovenia (as in Croatia) often yes, because of the very common Italian tourism on the Adriatic coast, but I have never gone beyond Postojna, so I don’t think the discourse can be applied to the whole country (already in Ljubljana I think it is something more rare).
As for Switzerland, premising that I have never been there, by necessity, in the Italian-speaking cantons such as Ticino and some valleys of Graubünden, the same language is spoken, but in the other cantons I don’t think Italian is very well known (to say, Valais, despite being just over our borders, is already a completely different place).
Galicians with the Portuguese, and more so vice-versa. There’s the eternal debate of whether they are co-dialects (linguistic consensus) or different languages (political issue).
Basques and Catalans may speak with people in France, but it’s the same language spoken by locals, not the standard language of a region in France, and not French, obviously.
Speaking on terms of national languages, there’s around 60% intelligibility between Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. More so in written than spoken.
It depends of the country and where in this country
Only with Moldova as we both speak Romanian.
We don’t understand anything from Ukrainian, Hungarian, Serbian, Bulgarian.
Yes and no. Sure, we can understand random words and guess the meaning of the whole sentence but it’s nowhere near the level of communication you’re experiencing in Scandinavia.
We’re just gesticulating a lot, speaking very loudly and repeating over and over the key words.
Personally, the only neighbor I can understand is Ukraine. Again, it’s not a real conversation but when Ukrainian asks me in shop/ at the bus stop about something easy, I am usually able to help.
I can’t understand shit with Czech people though. Me and my co-workers just don’t understand anything. Like, the words sound familiar but they don’t make any sense. But we always get the impression that they understand us better than we do, maybe someone can confirm. They just keep repeating the same sentence over and over again like I’m gonna suddenly understand but when I say something random, they always seem to get it.
I’ve heard that understanding people from Slovakia is easier but I have zero real experience, just instagram.
Not in our own language but they very helpfully forced us to speak their language so we could understand each other.