If you are not a native speaker, when you hear a short English recording for the first time, it may sound very different from the printed words. They might sound like very fast words and they might be very hard to distinguish from each other. You know the words but they get softer, shorter, and joined together with other words when they are spoken. This does not mean that your listening skills are low. It means your listening skills need different practice.
A short recording is useful because you can listen to it several times without boredom or confusion. Even one sentence, one short dialogue, or one description of everyday activities is all you need. If a recording is too long, then you might try to understand everything at once: every word, every grammatical idea, every sound, every detail of pronunciation. That leads to stress. A short recording allows you to focus on one listening task at a time.
First, listen to the recording without stopping it for each word. Listen for the general meaning or main idea. Is the person ordering food? Are they introducing themselves? Are they asking for directions? Are they talking about their work? Are they describing their daily routine? Even if you only know two or three words, that might be enough. You might hear words like coffee, station, today, English, morning, question, etc., which will tell you what the situation might be about before you understand the whole sentence.
Then, when you listen to the recording for the second time, slow down and look for familiar words. Write down the words that you know. You do not need to worry about spelling yet. You are trying to learn how to recognize words. A word that is easy to see in a vocabulary list might be harder to hear when it is used in a sentence. For example, you may not be able to hear the four words as four separate words in the sentence, I want a coffee. You may hear the sentence as one unit. That is an important part of listening skills.
When you know the general meaning and know a few words from the recording, you can focus on one or two short sentences. Read out these sentences exactly as you hear them. Pay attention to sentence rhythm as well as pronunciation. You will hear English native speakers put emphasis on certain words and say some words lightly. You may hear more stress on go, work, morning than on to and in in the sentence I go to work in the morning. Reading the sentence out loud trains your mouth to say these sentences in the same way your ear is hearing them.
After you have listened to the recording for the general meaning, the familiar words, and one short sentence, you can write your own short sentence. For example, She wants coffee. or He is at the station. or They study English today. This can be grammar practice without the pressure of complicated grammar analysis. You write a sentence and check the subject, the verb, the object, and the articles and prepositions that go in that sentence you heard. When you do this, listening becomes grammar practice, too, and grammar practice can teach you to notice what a recording is doing in a conversation.
Listening can be a very short session. Choose one short recording. Listen for the general meaning. Listen for the familiar words. Repeat one short sentence out loud. Write one sentence about what you have heard. Then stop while you still feel fresh, not overloaded. Listen not for the details you can understand in a recording but for the feeling that the recording may not seem quite so fuzzy when you listen to it for the second or third time. That feeling that your listening skills are getting better as you notice that the recording is slowly becoming recognizable as English is your first step to improving your listening skills.