Improve listening beyond intermediate level

I'm wondering, how to overcome this, and does it go away with time. Recently I've been finding it hard to listen to conversations, I listened to a conversation nearly about 45 seconds in length( it was with pretty hard vocab in my opinion though), and I had to hear it probably about 6 times, and study the vocab. for example I kept getting mixed up on 再考, which i thought was 最高.

Any tips, on how to understand something the first time, or is it just practise?

I've found that one of the best ways to improve listening is through Ondoku and shadowing. You can do it in steps if you have the script and audio. The formula for ondoku goes like this:
1) Listen a few times and try to understand the overall meaning (don't look at the script at this stage).
2) Read the script and see if you understood the meaning. Look up words you don't know in the dictionary and figure out the meaning.
3) Listen again and pause the audio, repeating after each line until you feel comfortable with your pronunciation and flow.
4) Listen again. This time overlap. Read along with the audio. Try and keep the same pace. Again keep practicing till you're confident.
5) This time shadow. Listen to the conversation without looking at the book and try to follow along with the conversation.

Doing this method really helps listening and also helps you learn new words, translate faster in your head, think more in Japanese, improves your pronunciation and your fluency, so I highly recommend it. I tend to skip some of the listening steps sometimes and just go straight to shadowing. I will practice a conversation until I can speak at the same pace as the speaker with no problem and without looking at the book.
For general listening practice, don't just listen to a TV program or music or conversation. Try and shadow everything they say. Repeat as much of what they say as you can while you're watching/listening. I worked as an English teacher and recommended this to many students, but it wasn't till I tried it myself that I found out how incredibly effective it was. I'm terrible at listening and I leveled up within a couple of weeks doing this for 30 minutes a day (my listening level was really low before). Now I do it for one hour a day and try to memorize speeches. You can choose something that interests you and practice with that.

Some times speakers in Japanese will utter syllables in such a fast and sloppy manner that they would be entirely unrecognizable. I ran into this recently while subbing a movie. Isolating the word and listening to it a hundred times would not help in such a case. They only way you can recognize the word is if you substitute appropriate words that you already know into the sentence and guess that that is what they meant.

I'm just pointing out that sometimes it's not the listener's fault that they cannot understand the conversation. Or perhaps studying vocabulary would help more than listening under some situations.

I'll try out the shadowing thing. My studies lean heavily in favor of book reading, but that sounds like it might be effective.

That's true. And in your situation, guessing is the only way. That sucks. xD Did you ever find out what it was for sure?

Vocabulary definitely helps. You need that under your belt first, right? I don't know much every day vocab which is probably partly why my listening is so bad.

The shadowing really, really helps. I can't recommend it enough. It forces your mind to think and listen in Japanese and doesn't give you time to translate. I find it best to repeat something until I can speak along at the same time as it without looking at the original script. The words and phrases become natural.


Oh, and sorry, letianchen, but to answer your original question, I don't think there's a way to be able to understand a conversation for the first time without first improving your listening skills and vocabulary. It's just going to take practice.