I can understand some of the words, like big, frog, pond, symbol, saddle, heavy, shield, ...

For the others, I might find them familiar after I look them up :)

I was in Bratislava a couple of times and after a day or two begun to understand the language. So the conversation was like me speaking in English and listening to Slovak.

I find Russian closer to Slovenian than Slovak is. More similar words. It's just the syntax is different.

I often compare the similarity of the languages like Italian and Castilian (very similar), Croatian and Serbian (very similar too). On the other hand most of the Slavic languages are somewhat similar :)

Ps: I intentionally used Castilian and not Spanish. I don't think there is such a thing as Spanish language :)