I feel that French is a rather thankless language in comparison.

if you speak french pretty well, its still not good enough. if you speak a bit of french, its taken for granted. if you speak no french, good luck getting anyone to talk to you.

meanwhile, speak three words of Arabic and people start cheering.

on the upside: Nothing helped revive my French just as much as being forced to use it (since English gets rejected). And people did seem to be patient with my attempts, which is worth a lot.

I'm German and I feel for the people trying to learn our insanely annoying language, only to get switched to English immediately. I'm fairly certain it's easier to learn French on the street than to learn German.

Afraid so

Everyones experience in France is a bummer.