What's interesting with French verb conjugation is that speaking them is far easier to learn than writing them. Many French conjugations sound essentially identical to each other when spoken. If all you focus on is speaking, you don't need to worry about the spelling aspect, which is where a lot of the confusion arises from. When speaking, the meaning is clear from the use of the verb rather than finding the word on a list of conjugations. Once you understand how the words are used, then you can focus on the spelling (and always think of the conjugation with the pronoun as a joined unit).
Unfortunately, the same feature makes listening to French difficult. The phrases "il parle" and "ils parlaient" (he speaks/they speak) sound almost identical. The latter ends in five silent letters.
It's usually clear from context, and easily understood by a native speaker. But a non-fluent speaker may be having trouble following the context, and lacking the additional clue of conjugation isn't helping.
I do a decent job at following written French, but spoken French remains a challenge (unless specifically over-emphasized for small children and stupid foreigners). I watch French television with subtitles on.
« parle » definitely does not sound like « parlaient », only the 3 last letters are silent. The former sounds sorta like an English speaker would pronounce « parhl », the latter like « pahrleh ». It also doesn’t translate to « they speak » but « they were speaking ».
You might have gotten confused with « parle » and « parlent » which do sound the same (3 silent letters again) and translate to what you said!
