Generally speaking, with closely related languages, comprehension will be higher when reading than when listening because the phonological and structural distortions are somewhat masked when reading in a way that I don’t quite understand.
The most closely related language to English is Frisian. There is an example of a Frisian sentence on Wikipedia. You look at it and it means absolutely nothing at all. Then the sentences is translated into English, and every single Frisian word is a transparent cognate of the English word. The two sentences match up word for word in a perfect way. But you can’t see it unless you put the sentences together.
It’s going to be like this with many languages. Everyday spoken German is full of English cognates. Of the 2,000 most commonly used words in English, 64% have German cognates. Yet I can listen to German tourists go on forever without catching a single word. Almost 2/3 of the words they are using are obvious English cognates, but they are so masked phonologically and structurally that they are simply invisible. English is full of Latin. No one speaks Latin anymore, but if you heard someone speaking Latin, I doubt if you could make out a single word.
Dutch is probably even better.
Dutch even sounds so much like English that your ear somehow picks up on the similarity. My mother says you can’t understand a word, but your ear strains to hear it anyway. I played a Frisian text on Youtube for my mother and brother. It lasted 13 minutes and I didn’t get one word. But my Mom and brother both said it had a very interesting rhythm, and the beat or rhythm of it somehow sounded like English.
This is interesting terms of cognitive science, an interest of mine. You can’t make out even one single word, yet somehow your brain is so smart that it manages to figure out that you are nevertheless listening to a similar language even though there’s no evidence of that by comprehension, which would be logic. Instead the similarity is intuitive or Gestalt. The two languages have a certain “somethingness” about them, but you can’t put your finger on what it is and if someone asks you to explain it, you can’t.