Quote Originally Posted by MikeM
In my opinion these two languages are very close. There are some differences in grammar, but I used to have almost no trouble reading technical literature in Bulgarian. I think I could read fiction as well if I spent let's say a month on learning a little more of the grammar and some vocabulary. I have a Bulgarian dicitionary somewhere, which lists so called false friends of a translator, i.e. the words that have the same spelling in both languages but completely different meaning... Having said all that, understanding spoken Bulgarian is a different topic altogether. I can't understand a word Although to tell you the truth I heard it spoken only on a few occasions...
Very close? Don't be silly.

Russian and Belorussian, yes very close.
Russian and Bulgarian... not really.

Well, Old Church Slavonic which is what Russian evolved from, was the language of (what was then) Bulgaria.

They are both Slavic, so there is going to be similarity.

But there are major differences. For exmaple, Bulgarian has articles which decline. Nouns don't decline (I think).

Bulgarian belongs to the Southern Slavic languages:

Eastern Slavic:
Russian
Ukrainian
Belorussian

Western Slavic:
Polish
Czech
Slovak
Upper Sorbian
Lower Sorbian
Casubian
Polabian

Southern Slavic:
Croatian
Serbian
FYR Macedonian (Bulgarian)
Bulgarian
Slovene
Bosnian (Serbian)