I’ve been seeing the use of the phrase “functinally illiterate”, and it got me thinking that I don’t think there is such a thing when it’s speech instead of the written word. There are plenty of instances I can think of where I or someone I knew was simply not capable of or didn’t want to try to understand something that was said. Is there something that means not bring able or refusing to comprehend speech when that person is fluent in the language being spoken?
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.