I still have a long while to go but I've found that, for German, two things have helped me immensely.

First, one on one conversations. The other person usually adapts their speed and vocabulary to what you can understand, but will slowly go back to speaking more naturally as you understand more and more.

The Glossika series of audio tracks. You can probably get similar results with any large bank of samples of true (native speaker speed) spoken language for which you have a translation. The trick is to listen to individual sentences or short groups of sentences over and over until you can parse every word and understand their meaning. If you can't, listen to it a few times before going on to the next. And come back to it again later. You'll be suprised to find out that sentences that sounded like one big string of sounds are now intelligible. As sentence structure and expressions tend to repeat themselves, you'll have gained the ability to understand other sentences as well, not only the ones you listened to.

If you can't do this, what you can do is to go over media in your target language many times instead of just listening to it once. Every subsequent listening will uncover a bit more words, as long as it's not content too much above your level. I just find it works better with short samples.