Others have already questioned what exactly you mean by your goal, but I’ll assume it’s to reach a listening comprehension level similar to that of an educated native speaker.
As you get more advanced, you have to study in more specific ways. Personally, I’d break down listening comphrension into several, separate abilities. Note: these are based on my ideas, rather than my personal experience, as I’ve never reached such a level in a foreign language.
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Aural vocabulary - you need to be able to understand a large vocabulary, when they are spoken. Reading isn’t enough, as you may not necessarily be able to recognise the words, when spoken, in particular in English, which is notorious for its spelling not always indicating the pronunciation of the word. To focus on learning the pronunciation of words you already understand the written form, listening to audiobooks (with a large range of vocabulary) is useful. Also, literature and poetry have a large range of vocabulary to learn the pronunciation of words you already know. Furthermore, there are many words and phrases which predominately exist in spoken language, but not in written language (often demeaningly called ‘slang’). To learn vocabulary used predominately in spoken language, you need to listen to lots of people speaking on a wide range of topics, particularly in ‘informal’ contexts.
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Subconscious understanding - you need an immediate, instant understanding when listening to people speak. This is achieved by large volumes of listening, of the order of magnitude of several thousands of hours. I think this is how you overcome the issue of memory in foreign languages, I mentioned I was having issues with before.
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Understand a wide variety of accents - even though native speakers from one region may still have difficulty with the accents of native speakers from other regions, you should still familiarise yourself with at least the more common accents. You are likely familiar with the more educated, upper-middle class accents from the U.S. and England, but, as you are aware, there are many more accents than this. Perhaps consider a few of these, even just a few podcast series from each region, ideally with interviews with/by working class people (who you’re likely to have had less listening exposure to): England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, U.S., India, etc. Also, if you are unfamiliar with it, African-American Vernacular can be quite challenging.
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Understand fast speaking - you want to train for the fastest possible speaker you’ll hear. To do this, train with increased audio speed.
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Understand poor-quality audio - one of environments, which is among the most difficult to understand people, is when they are speaking in a pub with loud music and lots of others talking. You want to train for such a scenario. If you aren’t in country, you may want to try to artifically create poor-quality audio by listening to chit-chat style, multiple-people podcasts in a loud cafe or on a loud, busy street with the audio volume turned down. Furthermore, when you don’t understand one particular word in a sentence, your brain can subconsciously predict it, if you have large amounts of experience with the language, particularly listening. I.e. with large volumes of listening, you increase your ability to understand poor-quality audio.
I mentioned an order of listening comprehension difficulty in another thread:
There are probably a few more categories you can break it down to, but these give you a good idea on the separate skills you have to gain to achieve such a near-native level.
To sum it up, you want to use the following techniques:
- Listen to a lot of content. You are looking on the order of magnitude of thousands of hours
- Listen to audiobooks/literature/poetry to gain the relevant pronunciation of from words you potentially already know the written version of
- Listen to conversational podcasts to learn oral vocabulary, i.e. what some may call ‘slang’
- Listen to audio on increased speed
- Listen to poor-quality audio, including artificially creating it
- Listen to a wide variety of accents, particularly those of working class people from regions you’ve had less exposure to (these audios probably require more searching to find)
As you can see, listening to large amounts of clearly-pronounced audiobooks and YouTube monologues can only take you so far. You have to seek out the difficulty. Personally, if I could just choose one ‘technique’ to train listening comprehension, I’d say listen to chit-chat podcasts/radio shows interviewing a large range of people from various accents on increased speed and low volume with a large amount of background noise. Do this for a few thousand hours.
If your goal is academic specialisation, that’s a different question. If your goal is near-native listening comprehension, I wouldn’t focus on academic materials. I’d focus on listening to everyday speakers, particularly those not speaking about academic materials (because they are more likely to be upper-middle class and you want to also familiarise yourself with accents from the working class).