I 100% with everything Duncan says. Listening for me is the number one problem. But this list is exactly how i have improved. I still have a long way to go. I teach English and am learning Spanish. People often ask "how long does it take to become good at English / did it take you to get good at Spanish?". The key to this answer is not "how long..." but "how many hours do you invest each day on your target language?". Depending on your level, I would say if you are not spending 10 hours a week on listening and reading, your progress will be very slow. Just my opinion.

keep listening, but in the way you can relate the sounds with the words, in spanish like in english is common to link the final sound of the one word with the begining of the next word (sinalefa). another point to take account is the accent, in latin america from country to country there are many accents with some differents meanings for some words.

Hi Kevin! I would recommend watching a lot of content of your interest in Spanish (Music, Tv shows, Movies...) You can also practice by having conversations with native people so you can listen to the way they pronounce and get used to the language. I am a native speaker, from Colombia, and I am avaliable if you want to schedule a conversation practice with me. I can help you to understand more by adjusting the speed and the vocabulary to your level as you improve. :) I hope to see you!

Hi, Kevin. I highly recommend the site "News in Slow Spanish". It's a subscription site, but it also has free content where you read and hear the content at user-controlled speeds. They also have free podcasts on YouTube, but it´s only audio.

I find that a mix between the following has really helped me: - Watching shows I find interesting with subtitles. Try to follow the actual spoken words with the text, rather than just reading and ignoring what's spoken (shame that the subtitles don't always match the speech!). YouTube auto-generated subtitle are actually strangely good. You have to pick out the occasional bit of gibberish, but they're fairly accurate and very literal / true to what's spoken. - Focused listening. Listening to slower spoken podcasts etc that I can understand almost all of. This helps to better understand overall sentence structure rather than just grappling for context around a few words that I know. - Lots of reading. Helps to build vocabulary and more easily recognise common words and phrases. - Speaking to people. Forces you to understand (or, oh no, ask someone to repeat something) so that you can know how to answer. I still find understanding speech hard and do the "grab from context" thing, especially with fast/natural speech. This approach has helped me a lot though.