Basically, there was this forum for Rozumio (a sort of idea for the panslavic conlangs that calls for common sense and a balance of Slovio's crazy schematicism and Slovianski's naturalism to achieve something saner for everybody), and one guy tested a text out on his slavic/english speaking friend (fluent mind you).

Unfortunately, the guy reported back with bad results, his friend not understanding a word of this panslavic jargon, despite being slavic. Some of the other forum users just put it down to the friend being a complete dingbat, others said its just that he musn't be good with languages, others said that only people with the same level interest in language would understand the language and that they were probably going to be unable to achieve their goal of helping panslavic communications.

While they were being cast into doubt, I was also (even though I was just reading this and had no part in the conversation ). It made me wonder what the actual problem could be, since my Russian skills are next to none having gotten majority of it from playing Ace Combat (a jet fighter game placed in a fictional cold war like scenario) and from watching Smeshariki (in Russian of course), yet I can understand the odd word or two in some of the Rozumio/interslavic/slovioski texts. Of course, I have a strong interest in languages so I wondered if it was indeed understandable only to those used to panlingualism.

So have any of you guys ever read a text in another language that you haven't studied and somehow known or not known what it was contrary to what you thought would be the case? E.g. how many of you would have been able to understand basic Esperanto/Interlingua/Lingua Franca Nova/Latin/Italian/French despite not having studied it yet? On the flip side, since the latinate languages are so damn similar to each other, have you ever read say a text in Dutch/German etc and understood what was being said straight away, or at least some of it?
Do you feel that having learnt any of these languages, you've become more adjusted to their relatives automatically?
Or having learnt English and Esperanto, do you find romance texts understandable at all?

It'd be interesting to see this from a Esperanto/English speaker perspective. The Romance languages, which are what tie EO and English together, are very similar to each other and so are the Slavic languages to a degree, so perhaps there is a native mutual understanding between speakers and that original friend of the forum user was indeed a dingbat or merely not too talented in langauges. On the flipside, the Germanic languages are less similar in written form to each other thanks to our crazy vowels and word compressing skills, so maybe the confusion between those languages is also present in the Slavic languages and the original friend of the forum user was validly confused, and the whole panslavic language and understanding idea is bust.

Ich kann die germanischen Sprachen nicht verstehen.
(If you leave out the definite article, it's correct: Ich kann germanische Sprachen nicht verstehen. That's German grammar!)

Anyway, I as a person who speaks German as a native language and has learned French, Spanish and Latin cannot really vote here, isn't it?

Well Before I started studying Esperanto I checked out Vikipedio and all I could ever make was some random nouns, however after I learnt the bare basics I could usually guess large parts of the text. By bare basics I mean "estas" "estis" "al" "de" "la" and so forth. However things that are most confusing are when you stumble across false friends and that can throw your whole guessing off language.

ceigered:So have any of you .. read a text in another language that you haven't studied and somehow known .. what it was?

Not myself, but I have no difficulty believing that other people might experience things like this. You reminded me of an interesting problem: the role of the subconscious in learning languages. It may be that this could lead to a person being able to understand cognates of languages already studied.

Understanding text in another language is quite different to understanding the spoken language in context.

When watching French TV I have not infrequently been totally convinced as to what would have been the English equivalent without any clear auditory recall of the exact French.

There appear to be certain clichés of TV drama shared between the two cultures, and just identifying a few words is enough to render the whole.

Anyway, any educated English speaker can guess the meaning of an enormous number of French words, since they are either identical (in speling) or very similar.

Many idioms are also shared between the two languages.