Immersion + Speech

I need to get used to hearing Italian in order to discern words during speech. Words blend together all the time during conversation, since Italian never seems to be spoken slowly.

In order to become immersed in the language I will look for movies and music in Italian.

Target: Learn + develop techniques for breaking up and understanding Italian speech.

Update 8/10/09: I lost emphasis on this and directed efforts towards the use of mnemonics and cognitive devices to acquire vocabulary. By hearing Italian speech repeatedly (heard the same podcasts over and over) I can now discern sounds better, but I'm still a long way off. More details later.