You say:

1) Watch or listen to TV.
2) Always pay attention to the people talking on TV and try to “catch” their sentences.
3) (Do) not try to understand them, as your subconscious will do the job for you.
4) (Do) not do anything that distracts you from the language that is spoken.

1, 2 and 4 I agree with. 3 is utter nonsense. Paying attention is trying to understand, after all. If you had said something like "don't try too hard to understand" then give clear examples of exactly what you mean by trying too hard, I'd have agreed with you.

Hi Vasia!

I think this is an important topic because you can't get very far in a language if you can't listen.

How did you learn to listen in German?  

<em>This is an interesting question for me because (in the languages I've studied on and off over the years) -- it's hard to find graded listening tasks; it's either full-on authentic TV or movies or really bad "Bill and Jane went to the Cinema" type stuff.  At least English learners have a wide variety of quality material out there.  I think you're on to something with the 'focused attention' idea.  Is that all, though???</em>

Did you have a large passive vocabulary that allowed you to pick out words / chunks as you were listening to a stream of speech?  

<em>I think a huge passive vocabulary, awareness of chunks (what verb phrases look like / sound like, what noun phrases look like / sound like), an explicit understanding of connected speech (reductions, ellipsis, linking, etc) -- this is first.  Then you listen a lot (with transcripts, notice where the gaps in understanding here) -- this translates into better speaking ability (provided you have a sympathetic interlocutor who stays silent, gives you space to formulate a long and complicated utterance...)  </em>

What I meant was that we shouldn't surf the Internet while having something running with a foreign language in the background, because humans can't really do more than 1 thing at a time. And about not trying to understand, it's actually impossible if you fucus on discerning the words. I'll give you an example. When you hear a word or see it, your subconscious tries to make sense of it as long as it is not occupied with something else. The example is this one. Try to look at this written word without reading it. Try your extreme best to look at it and not to read it, it's impossible:

peace

That's my idea of how our subconscious forces us to get a word's meaning as long as we are focused on it and don't do anything else. By not trying to understand I meant not putting any extra effort other than discerning the words you hear by sound.

Part 2

The regime of hearing is approximately the following:

1. on first steps I listen to some pages (some minutes) of book in my native language and the same pages in target language.

I do not write out the unfamiliar words and do not try to learn them especially - they are gradually remembered on their own.

The number of pages gradually varies from one (or even half) to a dozen, maybe the whole chapter. 

2. Then, from the middle of the book, I first listen to some pages in the target language and try to grasp their meaning (without a detailed understanding), but then I listen to the same pages in my native language to preserve the plot line and the book remained interesting for me.

And in this mode, you can listen to books for 2-10 hours a day. Best do it during walks, it is possible on the way at work and to home, during some simple physical work: washing dishes, etc. routine.

If there is no physical activity, for example, you just sit on the couch, then attention can be distracted.

In such cases, during the hearing, I can play in the simplest games, for example, Solitaire. More complex games, such as Sudoku, chess, etc. not suitable, only very simple.

After about 500 hours of listening, listening in your native language can be skipped, or you can listen only to those fragments that were not intelligible when listening in the target language.