Japanese learner, ~70 hours in. Reading is fine, but spoken still smears together at normal speed. For those further along — roughly how many hours until your ears caught up? Trying to set my expectations honestly, not chasing a number.
Sign in to join the conversation — it’s free.
For Korean it was somewhere around 120–150 hours that the smear started splitting into chunks. No single day — just one week I noticed I was catching phrases. 70 hours is still early. Your ears are mid-build.
Same ballpark for Portuguese. And it's not linear — it stalls, then jumps. Don't read the flat stretches as failure.