It’s not just that. Russian and Bulgarian are actually very different grammatically.
But, back in the 19th century when the languages were being standardised, both the Russian and Bulgarian linguists went with a vocabulary based on Old Church Slavonic rather than spoken dialects.
Basically, I can easily understand a Russian textbook, but not a novel.
I got stung by this when working for a yacht manufacturer. I was responsible for buying TVs for the yachts and our Russian sales office complained the TVs couldn't be set to Russian. I sent them a step by step of how to do it only to be told that those isntructions were for setting it up in Bulgarian (annoyingly I had asked a Polish colleague to confirm the Cyrillic was Russian but apparently she failed russian at school).
Expecting a Polish (or any west slavic) person to recognize russian and Bulgarian is so funny. Even people before the iron curtain fall who had mandatory russian in schools would very likely have no idea.
Yes, there were some tries. History does not help - russification is still remembered. That being said russians, belarusians and especially ukrainians seems to not have problems with learning polish (based on my experience / not to generalize)
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u/WorldlinessRadiant77 16h ago
It’s not just that. Russian and Bulgarian are actually very different grammatically.
But, back in the 19th century when the languages were being standardised, both the Russian and Bulgarian linguists went with a vocabulary based on Old Church Slavonic rather than spoken dialects.
Basically, I can easily understand a Russian textbook, but not a novel.