You might be having difficulties speaking/understanding the language with actual French people not because it's difficult/random (and it is, I believe that most

You might be having difficulties speaking/understanding the language with actual French people not because it's difficult/random (and it is, I believe that most teenagers can't write a full page of faultless French !) but because spoken and written French are quite different : contractions ( j'sais pas instead of je ne sais pas), using 'on' instead of 'nous', the simple past is never used, slang, etc. Since foreigners tend to learn written French, things get difficult quite quickly when in the field. Obviously, you're not allowed to write spoken French. Interestingly enough, if you listen to people talking in the 50s (old films, radio, etc) , they speak something which is a lot closer to written French. I'm under the impression that there's a growing gap between spoken and written French, and the French académie is not helping by essentially preventing the written language from evolving. As to cleaning it up, well, lots of people agree with you, but always end up facing extremely strong opponents who accuse them of destroying the very nature of French culture!