When will i understand the language that i am learning when i watch a serie or listen to songs?

I have been studying Spanish for a couple of months now, since the discovery of Lingq i have noticed major improvements in my reading skills and the ability to construct simple sentences about certain aspects of my life and on-going events. However, as soon as i watch series or listen to songs i feel like the are talking/singing in a completely different language and only recognise a hand full of words throughout the whole episode/ song. Does anyone have some tips on how to improve my listening skills effectively?

Good listening skills are the last to come I think.

When I hit around 30,000, I was able to watch a lot of telenovelas. Movies I don’t do much of, but they are possible now too. I generally will read with the Spanish subtitles turned on in Netflix since it reinforces the reading and listening aspects. I really don’t watch movies and shows without subtitles, but I suspect that withoutthem I would miss a lot at first, at least until I got used to it (wouldn’t take long I suspect).

I should point out that I find foreign shows and films to be so-so, but they are “good enough” for language learning purposes. My whole reason for doing this is have my listening skills “catch-up” to my reading skills. There are not many words/phrases I don’t understand in each episode. This is just for reinforcing listening, especially at a time when my iPod and Pad are shot and need to be updated before I can do more reading and listening on that . At 500 hours overall listening, I definitely feel a difference from say 200.

If you wanted to use shows and movies at a lower level, to me, it should just be for motivation and as a reward or becuase you really don’t like doing anything else. It’s not as conducive to learning because it’s too much work to save the words and phrases.

Songs are the very last to come. They don’t speak clearly, they are playing MUSIC over the lyrics, they use a lot of regional, poetic, and slang terms, and the pronunciation is usually distorted so it fits the melody. And there aren’t a lot of words like a book, article, or even movie. To me they are for keeping you motivated and rewarding yourself.

In my experience, you’ll start to really notice incremental yet significant improvements with every 50 hours of quality listening practice (LingQ/TV/Movie/Podcast/Youtube/Audiobooks). I listen in my car mostly with 20 minute blocks once or twice a day. Occasionally I watch Telenovelas. I like music but personally I don’t feel like I gain as much linguistically from it.