true dat. i've been trying to learn french for like four years. the only time i make progress is when i eventually become habituated to a particular set of vocabulary. I suspect learning english is the same way.
I'm not interested in other persons' wangs, so let's continue this off-topic discussions and allow me to comment on this one, as I've actually done both (had to), so a comparison between learning English and French can be done.
For me, vocabulary wasn't a problem at all. I'm quite surprised to see this as a problem for a native English speaker. Chances are your french word du jour exists in English as well and can be used straight away or with minimal modifications to make it look French.
English is quite easy to learn to be honest, because you'll practically understand everything from the start, save for horribly overcomplicated texts. English grammar can get tricky, but you'll almost never encounter this "in the wild," so you couldn't care less about the subtle intricacies of the English language while actually learning it. The horrors of correct English pronounciation are almost completely left out at school, so this will only be an issue when you actually start using English. Let me elaborate on that: German is a horrible language both to use and to learn and I'd never do it if I didn't already speak German, but pronounciation is very clear and precise most of the time. You read a word, you know how to pronounce it (there are some exceptions, but they're incredibly scarce).
So all in all, English is a language you can use after a very short time, grammar is not that hard, there are only a few dozens of irregular verbs and most of them can be grouped as well and the harder topics (style and pronounciation) are swiftly ignored at school in favour of reading books no one in the UK or US cares about. But all in all, English is quite okay to learn.
French! To be honest, I wasn't exactly keen on learning French and I still suck horribly when it comes to it, although thinking of it, I've spent more time in France than in English-speaking countries so far. Be that as it may, French is a lot harder to learn. Pronounciation is slightly weird to begin with, but grammar is where it'll get ultra-nasty. I can't stress this enough, but French gets nasty from the start. There's almost no easy way to say something, you'll have to learn lots of arcane rules to be able to correctly state events in the past or future.
To add to the horror, there's this absolute abomination of txtspk used all over the French internet. It seems to be quite normal to write in an absolutely incomprehensible mess of letters vaguely reminescent of spoken French. Only with luck will you finally figure out what they mean--and they're fast.
So French ... well. You can learn it, it's certainly doable. My rants nonwithstanding, it actually is a decent language (as opposed to German, I'm afraid). But be prepared to master horribly complicated grammar or you'll face eternal doom.
-huha
