reading aloud is a great idea, and great practice! you might find even authors who write the language very much as it's spoken regionally, dropping out silent letters, etc.

if you can find any conversation groups in person or on discord etc, you'll have the benefit of practicing listening and working on your active skills / language production.

for me, listening to a soap opera that includes people with multiple accents & dialects is really useful. the earlier seasons don't have any subtitles in that language, so i was forced to figure out what they were saying either by listening, or sometimes going back with english subtitles & translating it back to that language.

soap operas will follow multiple storylines, you'll get the gist and learn related vocab about particular topics from context, but you'll also be hearing native speakers speaking naturally & in various situations or while they're laughing / shouting / crying / etc, which you'd never get from a monotone slow news podcast etc.

soap operas might be a bit overacted / overdramatic too, so even if you're not understanding every word or phrase, you'll be able to tell someone's angry at another person, etc. i started out with several characters i couldn't understand at all, and now on season 8, i very rarely need to rewatch a scene to understand it & i'm picking up a lot of conversational phrases.

another oft-repeated piece of advice is listening to a daily news & special interest radio programme/podcast, maybe in the dialect you're focusing on. it'll all be native speakers speaking at their usual pace, you might hear athletes being interviewed while out of breath right after a match, or someone angry about a political situation, or someone doing a weekly comedic feature last thing on a friday, etc.

tl;dr: nothing helped my overall understanding as much as working on my reading & listening & speaking skills, rather than only one or two of them. although i'm still guilty of neglecting my writing skills and it shows!