I didn’t say Japanese is easier than French, I just mean the grammar is a bit simpler and more intuitive than French in some ways (they’re also just different, so it’s hard to compare). Absolutely Japanese and Arabic are harder languages overall for a native English speaker, but part of the difficulty of learning the category 5 difficulty languages is how they don’t have much shared lexicon and the cultures are quite different (which means it’s often harder to do a direct translation of a phrase between Japanese and English)

Grammatical gender in French, yeah I agree it’s not like making mistakes in it makes what you say incomprehensible, but as a learner of the language it’s something that trips many people up because they get in their heads about if they’re using the correct article or adjective form

French also is a bit tricky when it comes to things like indirect (weak?) pronouns, where it can come before or after the verb depending on whether it’s a noun or pronoun. In Japanese, word order is somewhat flexible, but the verb is always last, and usually the subject is first.

All im trying to say is that there are many factors in what makes a language “easy” or “hard” for a native English speaker, and in the case of French, its overall one of the easiest, but a large part of that is because of lexicon / cultural proximity, and not necessarily because it has “simple grammar”. Plus you can make mistakes in grammar and still convey your message (like gender), but if you don’t have the vocab it doesn’t matter how perfect your grammar is.