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I've experienced this in real life, I was on a committee that rotated meetings between the US and The Netherlands.

During a policy session in Zaandam with some Dutch, UK, Spanish and US peers we had a moment when our Dutch hosts had an excited conversation in Dutch but since it was a tech conversation both myself and the UK member blurted out at the same time that our Dutch must be getting better because we understood most of what they just said and didn't need them to translate it for us.

Same. Dutch sounds like unintelligible English to me, which is useful for identifying it as Dutch (once I realize it is, in fact, actually unintelligible).

Same thing with many Slavic languages that aren't mutually intelligible, like Polish or Slovene and Croat. I wonder if there is a concept of Hamming distance for languages.