The attractive idea that intercomprehension permits a person to understand languages that s/he has not learned formally has yielded impressive results in its implementation, above all with the Romance languages. In the school context, too, good results have also been obtained for the receptive competencies, for example, of Spanish and Italian learners with a sound background in French. Unfortunately, this approach is not transferable in this form for Russian since pupils are learning at most one Slavic language in school. If it is nevertheless desirable to make use of at least some intercomprehension elements for learning Slavic languages in school this is only possible by making use of intercomprehension across language families. This article presents the results of an intercomprehension experiment involving 123 eighth-grade pupils at eight high schools in Saxony who started Russian as their third foreign language and who at the time of the survey – a few weeks after the start of the school year – had only just learned the Cyrillic alphabet.