Hear another 8-second Italian-listening exercise
Listen to the whole interview

A note from Dave: you may wonder why I am asking you to concentrate on the individual sounds in abbiamo. You could have generally understood the passage without catching noi and abbiamo, because so many of the other words like cherchiamo and tutti are easy to catch. You might say to yourself, “Wait, if the goal is to be able to keep up with the conversation so that I can respond and participate, then that goal is served because I hear a bit of the word and I understand the other words like cherchiamo, tutti, etc. So I could fill in the blanks easily.”
But if you train your ears to hear those sounds, you’ll get more of the signal next time. You are already good at inferring, guessing, filling in the blanks. You can also get good at recognizing common elisions and vowel bends. If you recognize all of the signal, you can listen and participate without being distracted by the action of guessing and filling in the blanks and switching constantly back and forth between-top down and bottom-up listening.