Trying to understand audio

本当に、I find it とても 難しい (very difficult) to process spoken Japanese.  It just goes right past my ears.  Sure, partly my vocabulary's too small, but it also seems like Japanese speakers go lightning fast.  Rosetta Stone was never like this -- if it had been I'd never have gotten through it!

Here are a couple of things I'm trying to train my ears.

Erin's Challenge:  the Japan Foundation's free beginner lessons.  Short video clips, with subtitles configurable for かな、ローマ字 (roumaji), and English translation; dramas with characters, demos of Japanese skills, and more.  They still talk way too fast for me, but I get some of it.

Crunchyroll:  I've been watching Lovely Muco!, an アニメ about Muco the hyper, loving dog and her saturnine owner.  The reason it's not losing me is that the dog's speech is subtitled in ひらがな, so I can pause it and puzzle out what's she's saying.  It helps that her thoughts and thus her words are pretty simple.  But, yes, she's way too fast, and the humans -- forget it.

Edit later:  just found a video of A Finnish Dude Speaking Japanese.  There's only one of it so far, but I can understand a lot of the words, more than in Muco.