learning a language is one of those things where the more you know, the more you grow to understand the depth of your ignorance

Isn't that the truth! I've made so much progress since I took up French again two years ago, but I can see how incredibly far I still have to go, and it depresses me.

I was just saying to someone recently that one of my biggest problems is that when I hear spoken French, I know all the individual words, but I can't process them fast enough to make sense of what the speaker is actually saying. It sounds like "Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!" with an occasional coherent sentence or phrase thrown in. I'm not sure how to get past that.