Speaking is harder than listening because it requires you to produce language and convey ideas from your own mind, with proficiency in pronouncing it in such a way that a native speaker might understand you. Things like idioms you may be able to infer meaning from interpretation when you are listening or reading but you will never use them in speaking unless you really truly know them. You’re correct that the variables of listening are out of your control (which is what makes it so difficult as compared to reading), but that does not make it harder than speaking.
In the military where the DLPT actually tests all three categories for proficiency, speaking is consistently and universally, regardless of target language, the one language learners are least proficient at.
You will not speak what you don't know. There is no such limit when others just say things in accents, speeds or using words you have no knowledge of.
Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages, and the same for my fiancée who is a native English speaker with one secondary language.
...Which define proficiency nearly identically between the different skill sets. Your relative proficiency for speaking is expected to be worse until you reach native proficiency, where you are still worse at speaking than reading or listening, but it doesn't very much matter in most situations.
> You will not speak what you don't know.
Yes, and what you don't know with speaking is invariably greater than what you don't know with listening and reading, hence why everyone scores lower in proficiency with speaking relative to their ability in listening or reading.
> Starting to speak and be correctly understood felt much easier than accurately understanding others in my two secondary languages
If all my utterances in English were "I go school," "I eat pie," "I clean teeth," native speakers will easily understand what I'm saying. That doesn't mean I'm proficient or that it's easier to speak than it is to listen, just that I can create coherent and correctly understood sentences in English.
Test results and fet experience are not connected.
Certainly listening is easier than me speaking at the same proficiency as the other speaker, but in terms of what matters for using the language on a day to day basis, it is the other way around.
Obviously, everyone's mileage varies, this is just an anecdote :)
You feel more fluent in speaking because you're only working within your own ability while listening you'll encounter things you don't understand or situations where it's difficult to understand things all the time. That doesn't mean you're more proficient at speaking and in most cases you aren't going to be nearly as proficient at speaking as you think.
I do agree with the parent that listening is easier than speaking. When you're speaking, you have to know the right words, and know what order to put them in. Sure, there's some leeway: if you put words in the wrong order, or incorrectly conjugate a verb, or forget some types of words, your meaning will probably still go through. But if you forget other types of words, you just can't be understood. And sometimes conjugating a verb incorrectly does completely change the meaning of your sentence, which can confuse the listener.
I agree that the things you mention -- accents, pace, content -- are somewhat out of your control. But you can always ask the speaker to speak slower, and that will often lessen the impact of the accent on your ability to understand. The content problem is still there, just as it is with speaking, but I've found that I can usually understand more words than I can think of to speak on my own. And often you can get the meaning based on context even if you don't understand a word here or there.
I'm just a single data point, but... I took Spanish way back in primary school, for 5 years. I'm terrible at speaking it nowadays (over 20 years later). When I hear others speak Spanish, however, I can usually understand things that I'd never be able to speak on my own, even if I had all the time in the world to think about it.
Speaking is hard, but those native in the language is more likely to understand slow and broken speech with a little effort than a learner is to understand fast and unclear speech that takes shortcuts.
This is my experience with learning Mandarin at least, both using classroom teaching and Duolingo.
This is definitely not the case. Yes, listening to difficult audio is really hard to interpret. Your proficiency in listening isn't defined simply by how well you can listen to people in a perfect scenario, but also your capacity to understand the language.
Reading is usually easier than listening because it provides a ton of context clues, a visual indication of what is being said (as in... writing), and essentially no time limit. If you can work out what is going on surrounding unfamiliar words, you can, at least sometimes, figure out through the context of the entire piece of writing what the meaning is. With listening, you are constrained because you are listening at the pace of the speaker, but there's still plenty of advantages that exists to help you interpret the meaning.
With speaking there's none of that. It's entirely dependent on your own mastery and because of this people will almost always speak at lower proficiency than they can read or write. It might not be apparent to you because you're the one doing the speaking, but I can almost guarantee you that your level of proficiency is greater in listening than it is speaking, because you can't convey the same level of complexity in your speech that you can understand from someone speaking it.
Of course, I can decipher much fancier sentences than I can produce (especially in a controlled environment as I originally mentioned). My produced sentence will be much more awkward than the sentences I can decipher, but it will work.
From my perspective, this makes listening harder than speaking - I will not be fluent in a language until a decade of practical use, so the only metric that matters to me is whether something had practical application and acceptable understanding. In that sense, removing parts of a sentence you can't produce before you say it still passes as a success, but not understanding anything or most what a person is trying to say to you is not. Most people are not able to sufficiently simplify their speech as they do not know what or how you have been taught. If you are already able to have the meta-conversation needed to inquire about and discuss meanings of words and sentences comfortably, then you are already an advanced speaker.
Note that this is very subjective. I am expressing my current state of learning as it is, and claiming that this is wrong is silly. On the other hand claiming that you will experience the same would also be silly, but it's none tell less worth sharing experiences.
Certainly early on speaking is easy because you have a handful of words and know how to put them together, and listening is very hard because you can barely make out the sounds.
However, in my experience and I've noticed this in others too, after a while you get better and better at listening and it quite handily overtakes your ability to speak as now you're wanting to construct sentences more complex than "a table for four please", but you can't necessarily pull out the words and put them in the order you need in any useful timeframe.
In my country, lots of people are bilingual due to the nature of the ethnic composition. I know way more people whose much better at listening than speaking with the language that they're not fluent with.
TV, movies, anime etc can fulfill the listening purpose. But you have to do it in copious amounts and turn off subtitles.
In my opinion it's the other way around.
Reading is easiest in any alphabetic language. Both intrinsically and to teach.
Reading has no time limit so you can make your way through text at whatever pace you want.
Reading instruction is strongly amenable to automation. You can just sit and do exercises on an SRS until the cows come home and you will eventually learn to read. Not on duolingo through.
Speaking is the next easiest, you can't go at any speed but you can at least go slowly. Plus you only have to deal with one accent when speaking, your own.
Most languages have more consistent spelling than English, so if you know how to read an IPA phonology chart (and if you are embarking on the multi-year journey of learning a language then spending a time to learn IPA is a no-brainer) then you can probably figure out how to speak in a way that is understood.
Listening is the hardest because you don't control either the content, the pace, nor the accent. If someone is throwing words out like a gattling gun or in a non-standard dialect then tough luck. The learning curve for listening is a cliff in most circumstances.
Neither speaking nor listening are amenable to automation. TTS is no substitute for native speakers, and automatic speech recognition is a joke. So the only way to pick up these skills is with real native speakers which is expensive and slow.