[bitwize]

I can certainly imagine a French learner being confused about which gender goes with which noun. Before you say that this is ingrained in French speakers, so are unphonetic English orthography, Chinese tones and ideographs, and other linguistic sticking points ingrained in the native speakers of those languages.

French has quite a few words that break the apparent gender rules: un musée, un lycée, un mille (meaning "mile"; the homograph meaning "thousand" is feminine but usually doesn't take an article), le mort (dead person) vs. la mort (death), etc. All adding to the shit you gotta memorize. If you don't, your meaning will still come across but you'll sound "off".

(I don't even think I remember all my Vandertramp verbs...)

[emodendroket]

Well my whole point is that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to talk about whether one language is or isn't appropriate as an international one because the idea that one is just objectively harder than another doesn't really hold.