Native Macedonian speaker here, born and lived in the country the 1st XX years of my life, living in an English speaking country for the last YY years now. Two

Native Macedonian speaker here, born and lived in the country the 1st XX years of my life, living in an English speaking country for the last YY years now. Two data points. Episode 1. Growing up I picked up Serbian/Croatian without knowing, from comic books, movies (never synchronized, foreign movies subtitled only), songs and books. Got the surprise of my life 1st time I went to Belgrade (while in high school). I could understand everything spoken, I could read too. They could not understand a word I was speaking in Macedonian. And I spoke their language really badly, laghably so. ;-) It was funny. When I visit my old home, I have the impression that the youth nowdays don't understand Serbian/Croatian as much as we did. Episode 2. Sometime in the 90-s, I went to Sofia to see the city for the 1st time. I bought bunch of Computer Science books, the likes of The Art of Computer Programming and similar. Some bits I could understand, but all of the computer related words were translated in Bulgarian (from their English forms) and I had hard time following. Some works I could guess (remember the term for computer keyboard was similar to what we use for a piano keyboard), but looking up and translating sapped my enthusiasm for CS. :-) These days sometimes when I hear "Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian", I give a news site like https://www.dw.com/bg/ https://www.dw.com/bg/ a try, to see what I can understand. I recognize lots of words, the meaning of simpler sentences, news on current events news that I already am familiar with. Longer more complicated sentences, or themes I am not familiar with, I do struggle, to get the meaning of what is written.