How about the Spanish/Portugese/Italian people here understanding Romanian? When travelling through Romania, my poor knowledge of those Romanic languages helped me quite a bit in understanding the basics and explaining myself somewhat (the usual “A large beer please”, “How much octane is this?” and “I’m innocent, i didn’t know it was illegal!”). I found it easier to read than to listen to though.

By the way, from my experiences, knowing a language not too well does help in understanding another, similar language. With my pretty basic knowledge of Russian i found myself a few times much better able to deal with Belarussian, Bulgarian or Polish than those who are much, much better in Russian than i am. Fuzzy grammar and shady vocabulary works!