When I was doing some canvassing for the election in 2016, I was able to use my limited Czech to speak with some Polish speakers. My grandfathers, one who spoke

When I was doing some canvassing for the election in 2016, I was able to use my limited Czech to speak with some Polish speakers. My grandfathers, one who spoke Czech, the other Slovene, both at a native level (they were raised bilingually in their ancestral language plus English) were able to understand each other. My father was able to leverage his Czech (another bilingual kid) to understand Polish and Slovene and he had a fairly easy time learning Russian.