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”
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.