Do you know a language site called Duolingo? It's a free site, which also has apps, where you can do self-study language training. It has its faults and limitations, but it also has a simple little feature which I've found quite useful. One of the tasks you can do there is to listen to a phrase or sentence and write down what you hear. You can listen as many times as you want. There's the usual audio icon on the screen, but there's also an icon of a snail. Yes, a snail! I've just started using the site to study Portuguese, which, like English, has a lot of reduced vowels and elision. This makes listening comprehension quite difficult, but the snail icon is wonderful. A phrase that seems incomprehensible when delivered at normal speed becomes transformed into a series of slow, clear separate words at the click of the snail button. Then click back to the normal speech audio button, and listen again. Hey presto! You understand. And what I've found, as I've been going through the exercises, is that I'm using the snail less and less. It really trains your ear to become accustomed to natural patterns of connected speech.