Yeah, so by all accounts i'm the kind of person most likely to love the french language: native speaker, effortless spelling and grammar, avid reader of BD, i even like the flowery and decorative aspects of the language (language soutenu); but then i also speak other languages, and this gives me the perspective that, from a practical standpoint, there's a lot of issues with french. There's layers of sediment accumulated over centuries, a lot of rules and spellings are vestigial and serve no purpose anymore other than make it harder.

Also, a lot of rules and spellings come from grammarians just saying so, and writing prescriptivist style guides to make people spell The Correct Way. To a point, i even think the ability to invent and follow an arbitrary The Correct Way hass been a class signal.

Even native french speakers sometimes have bad grammar, or at least that's much more common than english speakers having bad grammar.

English speakers say the same things about their language, but they don't know about ô <--- this accent and the agony of trying to guess when it should be used or not. It's supposed to indicate a difference in pronunciation, but this difference depends on the accent and is also obvious from context. I've known teachers to dock points for shit like this, and it radicalized me against arbitrary rules despite being completely capable of following them. In my opinion, people use features that have a purpose; if people don't use it, then it's pointless.

And from a global perspective, fewer people speak french than a lot of other languages. On the one hand this doesn't matter, lots of people speak mandarin, it's about who you're likely to interact with; but i'd say your more likely to interact with spanish speakers.

Unless of course you're that much into BD. That doesn't surprise me at all, lots of english speakers learned japanese for weeb reasons, i think it's completely legit to learn a language for the culture. Actually i find it pretty impressive