Where's the line between a dialect and a language? -- Linguistics 101?

Imagine you and your friend both speak English, but when you talk to each other, it feels like you're speaking the same language, even though sometimes you say words a little differently.

Dialects are like different ways of saying the same thing. Think of them as accents or slang that people use in certain places. For example, someone from New York might say "bodega" for a store, while someone from London might say "shop".

Now, languages are bigger, they’re more like whole new sets of words and rules. Imagine if you spoke English, but your friend spoke Spanish. You both understand each other, but it's easier to talk when you're using the same language.

So where is the line between a dialect and a language? It’s kind of like how you tell the difference between a dog and a wolf, sometimes they look almost the same, but one is a language and the other is a dialect, depending on how much they can understand each other.