[lazyant]

> Listening comprehension, IMHO is the last skill to develop in learning a foreign language.

Speaking is harder

> The reason is that it's "all or nothing". You either know and recognize all of the words in a sentence, or you can't cope with the sentence at all.

Disagree; you can make sense of parts of a sentence and infer the rest or get some clues; actually that's the normal state while learning.

Eg: "How do I go to the station?"

"It is XXXX, you YYYY ZZZZ walk there, you need to take a taxi WWWW KKKK Uber"

[bayesian_horse]

In my experience I can have studied a language for a period of time and still only understand gibberish when confronted with truly random sentences by natives.

Your example isn't really random. You already seem to recognize the pattern. But there are a LOT of patterns.