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.