Okay, I'll add a couple of stories.
I am a kid. My parents and I are travelling on vacation. We are looking for a place to spend the night in a small town in Slovakia. Local people don't speak English. We quickly learn that "szukać" means something completely different in Slovak. After that, communication becomes easy.
I am in high school. I've been asked to read a certain short story by a Russian author. I ask my mom if she has it on her bookshelf. She does, but only in Russian. i can't read cyrilic writing. Mom reads the story to me. I laugh at a couple of puns and get a decent grade on my report.
I want to make a phonecall from a hotel in Slovakia. The receptionist says, in a very polite tone, something that, to me, a Polish speaker, sounds like "The telephones are fucked". She did get the point across, though. By this time I know that Polish, Czech and Slovak might not be completely mutually intelligible, but mutually funny is close enough.
On another vacation we find ourselves at a community center in a small village in Slovenia. There are people from several countries present. A man speaks in the local language and I have only a vague idea of what he's saying. Suddenly something changes. The man's speech still sounds exactly the same to me, but now I understand almost everything. Apparently, he's switched to speaking Czech.
I am travelling alone. I befriend an American at a hostel in Zagreb and we spend some time walking around the city together. My friend needs to buy something, but the shopkeeper doesn't know English. I say a few words, trying a bunch of synonyms, hoping to find one that works. The shopkeeper says a few words and hands us the thing we came for.
"I didn't know you spoke Croatian," says the American.
The next day I manage to buy a kilogram of pears at a market without the seller noticing I don't speak his language.
I am at a conference in Japan. I'm the only Polish speaker in the building and not expecting to be spoken to in any language other than English. Suddenly I hear a voice behind me. It is not any language that I can speak, but somehow I understand it. It's giving me a headache. I turn around. Yep. It's the one Czech guy. Switching my brain to thinking in Polish helps.
It's the spring of 2022. I am spending Easter at my parents' place. A group of Ukrainians have recently moved in next door. We knock on their door to wish them a happy Easter and they invite us in. We speak in an odd mixture of Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. i am only fluent in one of these languages, but one is enough. The new neighbors come from different parts of the country. Some of them came here to work, others escaped when the war broke out. Some prefer to speak Ukrainian, others speak Russian as a first language. Some are Catholic and others are Orthodox, so they're celebrating Easter twice this year. They invite us to another Easter breakfast next week. I bring a homemade cake.
