Hi Hyggerama, I don't remember saying anywhere that your MiL was abused and grew up in an oppressive cultute. I certainly did not day that I was 100% sure of it.
I was trying to glean from your posts why she might be behaving in a way that was so alien to how you thought a grandmother should be, and my suggestion was that she may come from a very different culture from yours, and that if she does, it is quite possible that neither of you understand why the other one behaves in the way that they do.
As you say, I have no idea what her living arrangements have been - except that she has lived in a foreign country (to her) for 30 years, has possibly never had her DiL (you) visit her in the town she has lived in for 30 years because - maybe conveniently - she has never been at home when you visit, and apparently, even though you have to pay somewhere to stay overnight when visiting her, you never actually check that she will be at home when you do visit?
In a recent post of yours @Hyggerama you said
"... she's had years and years of English lessons..."
I speak 1 language fluently OP, I can communicate reasonably well in another language, and I can understand bits and pieces of a language we were taught at school, but that I didn't try to get a qualification in. All of the languages that I know something of, come mainly from Latin, and to a lessor extent, Ancient Greek, with a bit of Norse, and snippets from many other languages.
As we have already established, and therefore agreed upon, I hardly know anything about your MiL, but if I may use as an example a theoretical 'fact', that she comes from either Asia major or minor (you are quite right, I should just say Asia rather than Asia Major, however colloquially I hope that it will help more people understand what I mean), your MiL would have as her mother language a very different structural criteria to my own. Which of course, in very general terms, means that unlike me, and the languages I have tried to learn, your MiL's (theoretical) genealogical history, combined with her now living in a continent with languages that mainly follow a very different linguistic typology, may well have led to her inability to learn English.
Yes, of course, millions of people have managed to overcome the extra barriers caused by different linguistic types, but then there are maybe millions of more people that are never able to break those barriers down. After all it is not just about learning what, say, the French word for table is, and what the Japanese word for table is - I really hope that it isn't also "table"! Very different cultures, histories, personal upbringings, ones own confidence etc etc, will all play a part in our own abilities to learn anything, including another language.
Is there any academic subject that you are particularly bad at OP? One of my parent's was excellent at Maths, unfortunately, for several reasons, I was useless at it. I quite diligently built up a 20ft tall, and 15ft wide, metaphorical brick wall against maths/my parent(?), and it has only been in more recent years that with the help of a good friend, I have been able to start demolishing that wall - I very much doubt that I will be able to raze it completely. You have told us OP that your MiL spent many years having English lessons, which I think she should be commended for, and thanked for, for making such a tremendous effort, and commiserated with for just not being able to master such a foreign concept!
My DMiL couldn't swim, she was a very intelligent and determined lady, but she had built her own brick wall when it came to swimming. A person who has the condition Dyslexia, may very much want to be able to read and write with ease, and their desire may help them learn and perservere with all sorts of techniques, and help. If they don't succeed to the amount they want to, or heaven forbid their Son or DiL thinks they should have been able to, does that mean that they should be looked down on because of it, or ridiculed, or punished? I am trying not to judge you for judging your MiL, for being what I consider is very unkind to your MiL.
If I judge you then I am no better than you, and I am afraid that I do indeed judge the things you have said in your posts about your MiL, and in quite a few of your replys to people who have similar views to mine. I hope that you have at least questioned yourself about whether there could be any truths or insights in what any of us have said. I do indeed spend quite a lot of time trying to understand how other people tick, and what good and/or enriching lessons I can learn from them.