I am learning a decent amount but I am struggling to keep up with the speed of locals talking.
You need to develop an ear for it. I have heard that listening to tapes while you sleep can help.
You are also probably being slowed down by translating to English as you listen. You need to learn to understand it without translating it.
One way to work towards that is to transliterate. This is a word for word translation that does not reorder words to create correct (English) grammar.
When I took Greek, we studied the Bible and everyone had an interlinear Bible that had one line of Greek and the English translation of each word below it.
Transliteration can help you get more comfortable with the grammar of the new language and can speed up your mental translation until you are more fluent and can understand the words as meaningful in their own right without translation.
You need to develop an ear for it. I have heard that listening to tapes while you sleep can help.
You are also probably being slowed down by translating to English as you listen. You need to learn to understand it without translating it.
One way to work towards that is to transliterate. This is a word for word translation that does not reorder words to create correct (English) grammar.
When I took Greek, we studied the Bible and everyone had an interlinear Bible that had one line of Greek and the English translation of each word below it.
Transliteration can help you get more comfortable with the grammar of the new language and can speed up your mental translation until you are more fluent and can understand the words as meaningful in their own right without translation.