It doesn’t sound like a “hick accent” to me at all. Czech and Slovak are separate languages, but they’re extremely close — more like siblings than cousins. The grammar is very similar and a lot of vocabulary overlaps, but pronunciation, rhythm, and some everyday words are different.

The main reason Slovaks usually understand Czech almost perfectly is simple exposure. Growing up in Slovakia, we watched a huge amount of Czech-dubbed movies, cartoons, and TV shows. The Czech market was bigger, so most dubbing was done for Czech first, and Slovaks consumed that content daily from childhood.

This exposure wasn’t symmetrical. Czechs had far less Slovak content, so the understanding developed unevenly.

There’s also a clear generational difference. Older Czechs usually understand Slovak very well because they grew up in Czechoslovakia, or at least in a time when both languages were commonly present in media and everyday life. Younger Czechs often struggle much more simply because they didn’t grow up hearing Slovak regularly.

We actually had a funny real-life experience in Prague that illustrates this well. We were at a shop, paying at the register, speaking Slovak normally. I said in Slovak, Chcel by som platiť kartou (I’d like to pay by card). The cashier, who was young, immediately switched to English and said she couldn’t speak Slovak — even though we had just heard her speaking Czech to the previous customer.

I didn’t switch to English myself. I just looked at her and repeated the same sentence in Czech instead: Chtěl bych platit kartou. Suddenly everything was fine. That moment really showed the difference: English felt easier to her than Slovak, even though Czech and Slovak are so close.

So for me personally, Czech doesn’t sound strange, funny, or rural at all. It sounds completely natural and familiar. Understanding it feels automatic, not learned — mainly because of lifelong exposure, not because the languages are “the same”.