I personally feel like I understand German-speaking people better the more I study the language.
E.g. my experience was that they are generally good listeners because their language has a sentence structure which forces the listener to wait for the most important information at the end of a sentence.
Bad Denglish to demonstrate:
“I have yesterday night… at the football field… together with friends … (dude get to the point) had a beer”
Could not agree more!
I used to be someone who talked a lot without ever listening. Learning a language made me start to listen to people all around the world… And wow did it change me. It was especially cool to hear people with completely polarizing political views speak for themselves, instead of me hearing them through the lens of news and memes.
Act of listening is a skill indeed, be proud! I had the same problem that I used to be a terrible listener. Thankfully I’ve had amazing people around me that called it out but were patient and helped me learn.
Listening is the hardest part of language learning in my opinion. It took me years of listening every day to be conversational and I still mishear so many things in my second language.
It is really hard! My teachers tried to give me tips and tricks but honestly there was no way around it: exercising listening A LOT was the only way to learn.