Welcome to the forum, Hank. Radio Ambulante is a great resource.
Learning to listen is a skill that takes time to develop and must be trained. It won't happen overnight and may take months. There's a great post by member leosmith at the old forum, HTLAL-
listening from the beginning that goes into greater depth than I am going to do here.
The key to training listening, for me, is regular,
daily listening- to the real thing, native-speakers, for an extended period of time. In the beginning stages many non-experienced learners rely on their courses for their audio and this helps but it isn't what you will be hearing "in the wild". This is where listening from the beginning is important.
OK, so you didn't do that. What do you do now? You need to find comprehensible input. Comprehensible input is native-speech audio that can be made to be understood.
lyrics training can be a fun way to train listening. Song lyrics are short and often repetitive. The lyrics to most songs in Spanish that aren't on lyrics training can be found online by searching "name of song + letra". You can also find karaoke versions on youtube. You may think this isn't a serious way to "study" but figuring things out on your own is a great way to build confidence and have things "stick" better.
Also, I would start listening to the news with a transcript. There is a pay site called "news in slow Spanish" that some members find helpful but there are also a couple of free alternatives:
NHK World Spanish. This is the real thing- intended for native-speakers. Yes, it's from Japan and the news has a Japanese focus in addition to international news, but the speakers are native Spanish-speakers. Here's what's good about NHK for training listening-
there is an accurate transcript . Scroll to the bottom of the page and click- "Escuchar" or "Podcast RSS" to listen and click on the first article. Then you must click on each individual article to read while listening. NHK is also available in many other languages with accurate transcripts: including French, Portuguese; Indonesian, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Thai, Mandarin- etc.
Why is this good for training listening and learning vocabulary? You'll get used to the announcers, they are regular and don't change very often. Did I mention that there's a transcript? There are numerous ways you can use the transcript. You can read first then listen then read again. You can listen first then read then listen again. You can read and listen at the same time. If you are really feeling energetic, you can search the English site for NHK and read the English version of the story.
Another news site which will be harder to listen to is
Democracy Now!. This is a Spanish-language translation of the US English language version and comes with a transcript. The Spanish is faster than normal speech because it has to fit into the same time frame as the English and Spanish usually needs more words than English does. The announcer is generally a woman with a rioplatense accent. The
English language version also has a transcript too and you can make your own parallel text easily from it in just a few minutes time. Here's a sample.
To make a quick, down and dirty parallel text: Open a text file in openoffice or word. Insert a two column, one row, table. Copy and paste Spanish on the left and English on the right. Adjust as necessary. Print to pdf or hard copy. Again, there are numerous ways to use a parallel text for learning: You can read the Spanish and only glance at the English to confirm your guesses or quickly find the meaning of a word or phrase; you can read the English while listening to Spanish; you can read English first then listen and read in Spanish, etc., etc. Pick what seems to work best for you. Ultimately, to really learn to listen, you'll be weaning yourself off of the parallel text and the transcript over time.
You can also do the same thing with subtitles. Have a look at emk's posts on "sub study" and "subs2srs" if you have the computer chops to do it. Check out what emk is doing with the animated
Avatar series. If you can't do the subs2srs, you can also go to opensubtitles.org to search for subs to tv and films that may or may not be accurate and make a parallel text like the one above, if they're not accurate they'll still make a great parallel text and give you understanding of what you are watching. I can make that parallel text in about five minutes for a half an hour show. i don't do it for myself but for a friend who is studying Spanish.
This helps you to use audio to learn vocabulary by both listening and reading. In order for this to work, you can't do it just occasionally. You have to do regular, DAILY, listening- until it becomes automatic. If you can't deal with news- all of the telenovelas on the
telemundo website and over the air have both accurate Spanish subs and English sub translations. The news is a good way to learn a lot of varied vocabulary and it often gets repeated as stories cycle over time. It is also extensive reading, especially with a parallel text. Extensive reading is a great way to learn a lot of vocabulary in a natural context.
So to sum up- audio with accurate transcripts, subtitles; Daily listening; Make your own parallel texts; and it's going to take a while- months. As long as you keep at it and don't give up, you'll get there. The problem with many learners is that listening is hard and takes time to train and reading is easier. Human nature is such that we tend not to seek to do the hard things in life. So, as a consequence, listening often comes harder for many to get good at simply because they don't do it
enough.
Good luck, and again, welcome to the forum.