Is French Hard to Learn? An Honest Answer
The honest answer: French is category i (one of the easiest for english speakers). The US Foreign Service Institute estimates about 600–750 classroom hours to reach solid working proficiency — but "hard" depends far more on how you study than on the language itself.
Why it is easier than its reputation
A few things work in your favour with French:
• an enormous shared vocabulary — roughly a third of English comes from French
• familiar sentence structure and Latin roots
• abundant film, TV, and music to learn from
The genuinely hard parts
No sugar-coating — these are the parts that take real time:
• pronunciation and the many silent letters (the gap between spelling and sound)
• nasal vowels and liaison (words running together)
• grammatical gender
The fastest way through it
French pronunciation is the real hurdle, and it is a listening problem — lots of understandable audio trains your ear for the silent letters and liaisons far faster than a textbook can.
That is the whole idea behind learning by listening and reading: fill your hours with French you can actually understand, a little harder than is comfortable, and the "hard" parts stop being rules you memorize and start being patterns you recognize.