[hnick]

> This leads me to believe that my difficulty in understanding spoken vs written French might not be so much grammar and vocab of spoken French, but rather the difficulty of translating sounds to words in real time.

I'm an English-only speaker and watch English with subtitles and it definitely increases my understanding too. I think I definitely have a problem mapping sounds to meaning, names especially can take me 3 or 4 times to hear properly when introduced if it's a little noisy. It gets embarrassing to ask them to repeat themselves.

Spoken conversations also don't stick as well in my memory - if I read something once there's a good chance I remember it adequately, not so much for listening.