To improve your listening ability, "practice makes perfect" is the only way out. There’s no shortcut. I believe shortcuts are for those talented people, not for the frustrated common brains. Just do it. But please be sure to set your hands over other aspect of English as you plough about the listening part, since English is a language, in which a manifold of skills add fuels to one another. This is a better way to have a profound English base:
1. Writing in preparations for talking.
2. Talking (imitation the standard).
3. Get used to the sound and you naturally and unawarely improves your listening ability.
4. Join interactive English programs to make the language real.
Juse be patient enough to get your goal step by step by step. However, there are some other ways provided by training schools, eg. the New Oriental TOEFLE and GRE training. In most of the cases, you are trained to have English as a test paper full of questions in the way abroad. But not as a language that is going to bring you joy in communications. (Well, I am not talking about those several exceptions.)
Rlex and have fun during the learing of English is a much healthier way.
Make full use of the abundant materials and shift between ways to learn (eg. reading today, watching TVB pearl tomorrow, go to English corner next week...and so on) and you never get bored by English as many others have complained it to be. In fact, it’s funny. :)
小谈听力（如何消除紧张心理）
Little by little, we learn English (including listening) from what real life provides to us.
Now, we are talking about listening exams!!! They are driving us nuts.
Enough patience to wait for the day when your English finally sees an improvement, but it could be your sixtieth birth-day. Before that, you surely got to take a lot of listening exams.
I think the fundament of English ability is static for a person during a considerable period of time. (Things do not always have sky-rocketing upgrades unless a stack of steady storages precedes.) So, no matter how hard you work, you are working for an improvement in a god-knows-when day. It might well go beyond all your exams.
And the KEY POINT is that, you work hard, you feel no improvement and you get nervous at the same time you listen to the tape. This is VITAL!!! Being nervous has proven to be the cold blood killer of listening exam takers.
You may have this experience in a listening test: There is an occassion of being stuck in a problem when you are not sure about its proper answer. Maybe the tape has left you a vauge pronunciation or maybe you simply do not know that word or phrase. Now, you stop and ponder over it. But the exam goes on and the tape waits for no one. You lagged behind. You then put away the former one. But it’s too late, you have missed half of the next problem. This is exact the time to trigger your nervousness in the listening part.
