My mom is able understands my dad and other family friends when they’re speaking their tribal language. Same thing with my best friend, she understands her mother but replies in English. I never understood how that works.
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Speaking language involves a motor aspect. So you need to recall not only what the word means but how to move your mouth / tongue / lips to say the word. And speaking a language is more than just saying one word, so you need to know how to execute whole sentences and connect complex ideas in a different language.
Hearing doesn’t have this motor aspect. It’s processed in a different region of the brain. You can think of it as a more passive process. Let’s say you grew up hearing a lot of Spanish at home but outside of home you almost always spoke English. You didn’t practice speaking Spanish outside of home so you didn’t develop the neural pathways for it.
A comparison is watching a sport vs playing a sport. Watching a professional football game, appreciating the skills, and knowing what may have been better plays isn’t the same as playing with the professionals on stage.
Person understands the meaning of sentence, but doesn’t have enough knowledge to build the sentence himself, so it would be hard to understand them, that’s how. Also person could have problems with pronounciation, so sentence would be hard to understand.
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