I have two basic tips to improve French listening:
1) Listen to French more, and see if you can pick up the "gist" of what is being said - then gradually you will be able to work out the rest, or at least most of it. Where I am from, to get marks in listening it is usually only necessary to understand one or two key words that will define the content of the speech - eg. If you hear "blah blah blah perdu blah blah blah son cle" then someone other than the speaker lost his key - the question as it is phrased may give you a clue as to who has lost it.
2) Think as much as possible IN FRENCH. This cannot be stressed enough. The more time you spend translating the words into English, the less you will actually pick up. If you can make the step of thinking what you want to say in French without first translating/ expressing it in English, then the speed at which you work will almost double. This last point is quite hard - I presume that for most of your life you will have spoken English only - but crucial and, if you make it here, then essentially you will be bilingual. Incidentally, this applies to all French work, not just listening.
Incidentally, I don't think I ever made the last step, but one good way to practice it is to use a monolingual French Dictionary. That way, you will learn to define words in French and not by their English equivalents. Using a French-English dictionary is good for translation skills, but not for listening skills as it takes too long to convert from one language to the next.
Hope this helps. But, of you can't get hold of a Dictionnaire Francais Contemporaire or similar, then you'll still be able to make it by practice!!!
Incidentally, watching French films with English subtitles is probably not a good idea to practice with, as very often there will be idioms that don't properly convert, or the subtitles are only "approximates" to the French as spoken. Instead, I'd recommend downloading French radio podcasts or tuning into it - depending on how easy this is - and listening to that without any translation in front of you, over and over again, until you think you know what it means, then check. Don't rely on subtitles!!
This is a lot of hard work, but what it's worth remembering is that learning any language is the hardest skill in the world, so if you can construct sentences in English that express complex ideas, and simple ones in French, then you really have achieved something quite remarkable.
Can someone give me a description of what French 4 is like - level, content, subjects covered, vocabulary and grammar, etc.?
