Pan-Slavic Miscommunication

In response to a comment that I received, I started thinking about the distinctions between Slavic languages. It's mostly anecdotal, but I've almost had more luck understanding Polish and Croatian than Russian at times. This goes against the logic that more closely related languages are easier to understand. Last time I was in Ukraine, it was terrible sometimes trying to converse and read in Russian, which is East Slavic like Ukrainian, but I seemed to have a lot less difficulty once I was in Poland, even though I don't know any Polish, which is West Slavic. My mother too, I know, has been able to understand a bit from various South Slavic languages, and there is plenty of evidence for high degrees of mutual intelligibility between all, but it seems to not line up quite right.

Just about the only Croatian I can specifically remember hearing was Luka Kovač saying things here or there on the show E.R. years ago and me realizing that I understood perfectly, and then having to remember that the language is actually relatively closely related.

If an actual example would help illustrate, I would probably have to say that East Slavic languages all use variants of собака, while everybody else seems to use пес, or something like that. Interestingly, the Russian variant of пес, пёс, seems to be a bit limited in its usage, while, and maybe this is just for me and some people I know, пес is the default and most common word to use for a dog.

Incidentally, a Ukrainian friend of mine always tells me that I write and talk like a Belarusian. But who knows what that is supposed to mean?