I used to like owls until I tried duolingo…
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I too did Latin for three years at Grammar school. Later in life when I embarked on German at a professional level I was astonished to discover that German has a vocabulary of concantinated grunts superimposed on an exquisite (thanks to generations of monks) grammatical base derived from Latin.
Spanish at least has both a Latin base and Latin vocabulary. An enlighten influential Spaniard in ages past decided to adopt a local phonetic version of Latin. Sadly the ‘French’ chose a non phonetic version of the same.
Sadly we English speakers struggle with our own bastard mix of phonetic German and non phonetic French, both based on Latin grammar (of sorts.). The result is a mongrel language that turns out to be the richest language in the world, and hence by virtue the most complex
Yet we English speakers, having triumphed over that rich (tho’ bastardised) complex language of Celts; Saxons; & Normans (and reference Shakespeare etc ) consider French difficult.
And we English speakers think French is difficult. I’d hate to be a French student struggling with English words like ‘night‘ … ‘ enough’ … and a language in which the word ‘GHOTI‘ Can be pronounce FISH.
GBS being funny again.
German is a marvellous language. People think it is difficult but they are wrong. I think actually Spanish seems easy and then gets more complicated which means lots of people can get by in it and few really use it well, but that may just be me being picky. I do like Spanish (and read a lot in Spanish).
I think everyone should learn Persian - Persian has the most sensible and usable structure of any Indo-European language - and a massive body of literature to support it. There’s just the alphabet to learn, it isn’t hard.
Arabic* grammar is an absolute horror. Turkish* has been helped in some ways by being romanised, I can see why Atatürk wanted that to happen, but it has also cut Turkish speakers off from a huge chunk of their own history. It is even more agglutinative than German and has vowel harmony which makes it fun 
- neither of these is IE obviously and they are 2 different families.
Peter, just come across your post and that is cexatly what I needed to learn.
Being reasonably fluent in my own language I find it embarassing to be so incompetent in French, so am reluctant to open my mouth in case I put my foot in it.
Like you, I got an “O” level way back when we assumed that everyone spoke like Charles de Gaulle.
These days, the language has moved on. We overheard a woman in the supermarket telling her child she wasn’t buying him an expensive pair of trainers, “Yapastataille.” The question might have just as easily been “Maman, c’est quoi un paradiddle?”
I shall try to talk more (when I am able to discard the mask and stand closer than 2 metres.) Better to be a funny foreigner than someone with nothing to say.
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Remember we don’t leave gaps between words, yapatataille or ilnyapatataille is how it should sound 
not paradiddly at all
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You have exactly put ypur finger on the problem! 
And the near absence of word/phrase stress makes it hard for anglophones, I have been told we sound like machine guns…
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Yes, the absence of word/phrase stress does make it difficult for me to ‘parse’ spoken French, and decipher the grammatical structure, though it gets easier.
At my early stage of learning, and having developed a fairly robust entendu vocabulary I can negotiate the fast flowing stream of words by identifying familiar stepping stones, and thus get safely to the farther shore…
Then the missing links usually fill themselves in. If I can remember the approximate sound of mystery word, usually a verb, I can ‘rub it clean’ , recognise its ‘root’, and figure out its declension.
I often wonder what spoken English sounds like to a French listener who doesn’t understand it, and what the sound of 'English-accented" French sounds like to the native ear?
I am usually identified as English by my accent in brief exchanges, but if I initiate conversations with French people outside the usual transactions in shops etc. I am quite often asked where I come from, which suggests my accent is not always easily identified as an English one.
I long ago came to the conclusion that the “phonetic unit” in French is the sentence, if not possibly the paragraph 
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You probably speak much better than many English speakers and aren’t recognised as one, we have been traumatised by the ones who just speak English louder 
We are brought up to believe that “Of course they understand English, just speak LOUDER!”
Isn’t that an urban myth? 
@Mike_Kearney
Well you see my Scottish half of the family are very francophile and polyglot so I never encountered that type.
I say Old Chap - Sausage, egg and Chips, don’tchya know?!?
With apologies to Eddie Izzard.
Being serious…
Apparently languages vary in the amount of information they convey per syllable - BUT almost all human languages convey the same amount of information per unit time.
So, if your language conveys less information per syllable, you speak faster to compensate - Japanese is a model low info per syllable, high syllable rate language.
As is French…
Ducks…
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So do I, especially in supermarkets 
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Sadly, Peter… I can still recall hearing my mother say it … and I still flinch at the memory.
“I shall speak English loudly and clearly… and I’m sure everyone will understand…”
My father was taking her for her first trip abroad… one week travelling around France.
We kids were left to the tender mercies of grandma… 
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I think I was about 13 when I first visited France. My father prided himself on his command of the language, though I now suspect that, like me, he could just manage to get by with the help of a dictionary.
Trying to order in a restaurant he was humiliated by being told, “Zere is no need to spik French, I spik very good Eenglish!”
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I was 14 … and was absolutely mortified by her attitude…
My first trip abroad was my honeymoon… a wonderful experience… 