Watching video with little comprehension

From time to time I watch Japanese-language video on YouTube.  At this stage I have very little comprehension of what's going on, but some people swear blind that at some level it's causing linguistic connections to be made in my brain, and that eventually it will pay off.  I find it very difficult to concentrate on the audio when watching foreign-language video... what really catches my attention is the speed with which the (foreign-language) captions appear and disappear.  This applies even when I'm watching content in a language that I can read to a sort-of-adequate level, such as Russian—when a caption flashes up for a few seconds and then disappears, I'm not going to be able to read all of it.  This really shows the difference between being able to read moderately well and full fluency.  Similarly, the constantly-repeating banner ad text on Russian-language newspaper sites defeats me until I've had the chance to look at each frame of an ad a few times.

I hope, within the next month, to master most of the kanji.  I've sort-of done the first few hundred of them several times and then run out of steam; the desire to really complete the general-use kanji (including the new ones that were added last year) is a good motivator.  Embarrassingly, I have 'learned' the hiragana and katakana a few times but have forgotten about half of each of them in between each learning session.  That's something else I need to get down pat this month.

Anyway, back to the Asahi Shimbun channel.