The hard way to improve your listening ability of Chinese--it worthes your time! What I did when I was preparing for TOEFL was "listen and write down". Find some Chinese conversations, news or short essays with translations. Don't look at translations. Listen to the material and write down what you hear. You can stop, repeat or even slow down the material with your player. I recommend you to listen one sentence at a time. If you don't catch it, repeat it as many times as you want. Typically, at early stage I use 40 minutes to 1 hour to listen and write down to a material that's about 5-10 minutes long(Normal speed). It worths the time because it's gonna lock the impression of the pronunciation in your brain and make you react properly and quickly next time you hear it. Then compare your work with the translation and find all the tiny difference bitween yours and the translation. I think the difficulty here is to find listening material with PINYIN translation. Check if your Chinese textbook has CDs that you can use. I will try to find some for you too. Another thing I did was listen to audio book. Choose the book that you are interested in so you can keep making progress. It's convenient because it doesn't require you to stop what you are doing. Hope it helps. Permission needed to redistribute.