Economics debate...

Video (published 22 Dec 2013): debate about the Brazilian economy in 2014

Love the sound of this language. They fade out often, not pronouncing the end of every word very loudly. Makes it tough for learners of Romance languages, since most of the important grammatical information is at the end. Not unlike the French, who might as well have all 26 letters of the alphabet at the end of every other word...they would still be silent, purely grammatical markers (except if the next word started with a vowel...yikes).

Slowing down this video (the first few minutes that I watched) was moderately helpful, although I was surprised to feel like I needed to speed it up. Listening at normal speed, I had a higher comprehension. With the Italian video about the pasta I posted earlier, it was the opposite. I think it's because of the end-of-word pronunciation. 

- With Portuguese, they blur the words and the most important syllables are the first few. I picked up on cognates here and there, and at full speed, the words chained together to allow me to understand more of the conversation than if I had been listening at slow speed spending more time thinking about each word.

- With Italian, you hear the last syllables, the grammatical markers, much more often. It's part of what gives the language that wonderful musical quality. But it can also act as noise - it can be hard to focus on meaning (first few syllables) when the grammar indicators (last few syllables) are pronounced just as loudly. In fact, in multi-syllabic words, the 'grammar' part often receives more time and volume than the 'meaning' part since the stress in Italian is usually placed on the second-to-last syllable.

A key to listening is giving up the expectation that you're going to understand every single word. At the same time, I think you can convince yourself that you're at least following a monologue or a conversation. This works especially well for languages in which the speaker changes tone or volume as a function of the argument itself - e.g. 'leaning into' the main point of a sentence by raising the pitch, increasing the stress, and either speeding up or slowing down - thus creating a sort of suspense that may manifest itself in the listener's behavior, particularly if it's in person.  You might see the listener leaning forward in their seat in the building suspense. 

Anyway, when I see a video like this, I try to act like I'm following it, and concentrate on the message rather than the words themselves, even if my brain is registering some words along the way.  It's like speed reading - the more you think about the words themselves, about the ink scribbled in curves and lines on the paper, the slower you're probably going to read.  When watching native speakers, it's clear that they know what they're saying, and those around them are thinking about the message, not so much the form.  As long as the listener is attentive and the environment is suitable to communication, the message is going on a more or less straight path to the listener's brain for consideration. So as a foreigner, I'm sometimes tempted to focus on each specific sound, to try to decrypt those sounds for complete comprehension.  But that's not how language works.  We rely on chains of sounds, groups of words, to construct meaning.  There's a reason that native speakers of any language are able to speak, read, and listen at rates which exceed the capacity of the human brain to register and consider all the possible meanings of each particular sound or symbol.  We get used to hearing and seeing certain sounds and symbols together, so we really speak and write in phrases more so than in words.

I think, therefore, that it would be a good approach to listening and reading in a foreign language to try to recognize those common chains of words rather than the words themselves.  Listen for, look for phrases.  Let familiar groupings of letters or sounds clue you into the meaning of a particular word (e.g. importante, important, important in Portuguese, French, and English) but don't stop there.  Anticipate what types of other words might follow.  For example, if I hear 'mais' in Portuguese, I'm expecting an adjective next.