Comment on Is there a word for when someone is not capable of, or doesn't try to understand verbal communication in a language, they are fluent in similar to functionally illiterate but for speech?

solrize@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• Riddle@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I moved from the US to Portugal and have been taking classes. I can read Portuguese at a basic level and with enough effort write it. However, I cannot understand it when spoken by a Portuguese native speaker. There are a lot of words smushed together that just don’t register in my brain. Oddly, I can understand it when a non native speaker speaks it (I guess, Portuguese with an accent?). I work with people from all around Europe and I can understand, for instance, a Romanian guy speaking Portuguese just fine (though I don’t know any Romanian).

  It’s not a hearing problem, it’s just that it sounds so different that my brain isn’t really picking out the separation in words and so I can’t understand it.

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