Ways to improve your listening skill and make your English more natural

So I was told by one of my friends how we could improve our listening skills (I don't know where she got the tips anyway). Many people learn English by listening to a cd or tape recorder whilst reading the conversation in a textbook. But sometime the conversation is too rigid and doesn't happen naturally like in everyday English, so it sounds pretty weird, awkward, and funny if we speak that way to native speaker in daily life.

There are three methods we can use as a learner whose native language isn't English to make our listening skills better and our English more natural. Here they are:

1. Watching movies
Yesss!! it's a must because movies give you a real and more natural conversation. But beware, the cast in movies might speak so fast that we almost hear them said "blabalbalbhsgrh&%$?@#>*??!!". What? Yes that does happen to me so don't worry it's not only you. What I did about it was put subtitles first in my native language and watched the movie. And then after I knew the story and the meaning of every words the cast said, I just watched the movie over again but replaced the subtitles with English. Sometime there are sentences or phrases I don't understand even if they are written in English like "There's something I wanna get off my chest" but because I already watched the movie in my native language and know what they exactly said in that scene I can guess it. (Or yeah, if I was lazy to remember I'd just search it on Google)

2. Listening to music
I love listening to music!!!!!! Well lyrics are not grammatically correct most of the time but we can get vocabularies and meaning of the lylrics themselves. And I frequently sing along :P

3. Meeting people around and listening to them
If you're living in a place where people speak English that's great, just go outside, meet many people and listen to them! But if you are not, don't worry, sometimes there are foreigners visiting our countries and fortunately we can meet them, right? So take that chance to listen more closely to them or even strike up a conversation.

Well those are tips from me (from my friend actually). Hope they help! :)

Just a few simple mistakes and ones that are very common for Indonesians - you miss off capital letters and sometimes forget to make things plural. Plus a few tense problems, but otherwise well written and interesting.