Oh, and an afterthought... It's much easier to understand a dialect of your native language because you already have a very comprehensive vocabulary and unders

Oh, and an afterthought... It's much easier to understand a dialect of your native language because you already have a very comprehensive vocabulary and understanding of typical language use in your country. It's fair easier to fill in missing words from context, because there's only so many possible words it could be, and some completely new words can be inferred from context without ambiguity. For example, "can you pass me the oojamaflip?" or slightly easier "can you pass me the whatsit". No native English speaker would even question those, even though they're very dialectal even within the UK, because it's clear it's just a stand-in word for something else. But if a foreigner heard that, they might have a chance with the second one, but the first one would leave them puzzled as to whether the oojamaflip was a specific term for something that they've not come across, or just a nonsense dialect word. If you actually stop to analyze the phonemes in spoken English, you'll realise that it bears almost no resemblance to written English, and unfortunately most learners of English practice on the written forms and make their own models of how the language should sound from that. For instance "are we going out tonight?" is actually the phonemes "we gan aa t' nii?" (in my local area at least) Personally, I think it's better to think of spoken and written forms of language as two entirely different things, but of course knowing one helps with proficiency in the other, as the underlying meaning, vocabulary and word order is usually the same, even if the abstract representation of it is different.