French is indeed an extremely difficult language to learn, second only to Slavic languages maybe as far as European languages go. Sorry about that !
In my experience, English has been, by far, the easiest language to learn - even though it too has lots of pitfalls when it comes to pronunciation. Espagnol has roughly been on par with French in terms of difficulty, while I've always found German too logical in its grammar and pronunciation.
I play with the idea of trying to learn either Mandarin Chinese or Japanese, but that will be one hell of a challenge, I suppose !
I only spent a year in French and we covered present tense for the first year of course. From my friends I know they covered past tense and formal writing in subsequent years, but then I had already dropped the subject. What I learned so far at that time sounded quite easy. No continuous tense and present tense. Big words are heavily borrowed into English, so when you see "preferer" you know it is related to the English word "prefer" (of course "preferer" means "to like" in English).
But pronounciation as you said is tricky - it is notoriously difficult to really remember any sounds you learned at school lessons. I kept forgetting them after I returned home until I bought an audio French lessons pack. Gender is another nightmare - after all, how can France be a "she", hair as "he though plural", and we have haircuts as a "she"?
I found German easy to master after you have English and at least some French lessons. It is logical, and you won't get things like "Why do we use present continuous tense or switch to present tense depending on contexts?" like English.
Chinese would be fun, but Chinese characters require really hard drills in the learning processes. I spent about half an hour each day on Chinese character writing lessons, and this lasted for 8 years from kindergarten and primary school days. Word order is critical to the meaning as well. As a compensating measure there are no tenses, plural changes in nouns, no inflections, no articles, and no prepositions in grammar. Don't know anything about Japanese because I took French instead.
French is indeed very difficult to learn, because of the pronounciation. The hardest part is of course comprehending the spoken word.
Comprehending written French is easy, while speaking it is pretty tough. But hearing and understanding, well, it takes a lot of immersion.
I happen to be reviewing my Capretz "French in Action" for a trip in June, and it's amazing to me how much I've forgotten (from disuse).