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”
Funny, as a German speaker who learned Spanish its exactly the other way round. Here people already start responding to what you say before you can finish the sentence. And generally people love to talk very fast.
I can imagine! Last time I was in spain I ditched the translator app and tried to communicate with my hands because by the time I was able to write something I felt that the other person had switched topics 3 times.