Two ways of listening.
We listen either top-down, or bottom-up. Top-down is listening to the news on France-Inter, and understanding enough to follow the sense of each news item. It's not clear what percentage you have to pick up for it to make sense, but I reckon it's pretty low.
The brain is very good at making us believe that we've picked up more than we have. If you listen to a sound extract and then check with the transcript, you will be amazed how much detail escaped you. Listening to radio, television, films in this manner is what we do all the time. It helps your comprehension - but not as you might expect. You are actually learning the cultural context - the way the Méteo is presented, the expressions used by the radio presenters, often used expressions, the ambiance of the programmes. The brain uses all of this to interpret sense. Top-down is like reading a French novel without checking unknown vocabulary. You will enjoy the book more without the irritation of flying to the dictionary every two minutes. But you don't learn much new vocabulary.
The Bottom-up exercises are to improve the 'sound vocabulary' of the ear: the words and expressions of French that are so often shortened, spoken indistinctly, and which we can never understand merely by playing the sound extract over and over again.
An example : I remember being confused by a word I heard on the radio in the context of the Roland-Garros tennis tournament. My brain told me it was tourbature. The word was quite distinct - but it doesn't exist. It was only when I happened to see a newspaper report that I realised I was hearing terre battue - hard court.
We offer Bottom-up exercises to link your French vocabulary to the sound of words and expressions in every day use.
You can't understand words you don't know...
Painfully obvious. When you listen to a radio programme there will be a percentage of French words which you know, but where your brain refuses to link the sound and the word, and another percentage where you don't know the word at all. No wonder you can't understand what's being said.
So these exercises are also about learning new vocabulary.
How is that word pronounced?
Ah, pronunciation. Or elocution as we used to call it. Why do the English pronounce French so badly? It must be a spiritual reluctance to allow the lip to loosen and the lower jaw to wobble. Learning to listen to French is also learning to pronounce the language.
Spoken French doesn't wait for you to catch up...
No, no - they don't speak too fast. We just can't listen fast enough, is all. I think spoken French is a little faster than American English - judging by American films dubbed into French, where the French voice-over has to slow down to the American rhythm. But there's very little in it.
An essential part of these exercises, for vocabulary, pronunciation and rhythm, is to read the text out loud at the speed of a French speaker.
When you do that you'll find that a passage that you would understand
well enough if you read it silently, with pauses to allow comprehension to
form, becomes very murky indeed.
Part of learning to listen to French is therefore learning to read, out loud,
at normal French speed, with a good level of comprehension.