Q – How am I supposed to understand spoken French?

A – With your ears. If for some reason, you have something stuck in them, I suggest you have whatever’s blocking them removed, lip-reading will only get you so far.

Q – How do French people live with it, speaking like that?

A – We’re doing fine, and have been for about a thousand years, thank you for asking.

Q – Do I fail to hear critical vowels or do they omit saying it.

A – Probably a failure on your part, I agree.

Joking aside, you do have a point about the big discrepancy between the way French is written and the way it is spoken and you have a right to be miffed about it, but still it’s a bit rich coming from an English speaker given that English spelling is just as erratic and the spelling-to-sound correspondences a bit of a nightmare as well.

A bit of advice to conclude, keep at it, expand your vocabulary, the more you know, the more you will recognize.

All your questions are those of someone who forgets that to get to the point of using his/her mother tongue easily he/she had to go through a long formation that began virtually in the cradle, kept on with kindergarten, then was made systematic through many years of elementary school and left him/her to realise then that if he/she really wanted to understand the speech of politicians and educated members of his own community he/she had to go on with many more years of high school. You have to come to grip with the fact that all those notions about learning a foreign language in 3 weeks are utterly ridiculous, absolute trash. Learning a foreign language is a long and arduous task into which you’ll have to invest a lot of time if you want to do well. All I can say to you is work assiduously and be patient, everything will fall into place in due time; it’s a matter of time.

Watch and listen to French as much as you can. You’re on the right track, trying to understand through context. Eventually your brain will learn how to make sense of it, just as it does in English when we smush words together 🙂

There’s a good YouTube channel called 7 jours sur la planète that has French captions below the interview, so you can listen and match it up with what they’re saying. Great way to get more familiar with French pronunciation and rhythm.

(I’m also a huge fan of Lingq.com, which has written and audio texts for you to learn from)