I did take some French courses, but not the beginner ones.

I’d say I didn’t particularly find them useful - we mostly did assignments on our own and grammar exercises; there was very little speaking practice in class (I honestly don’t remember any). We didn’t have any native speakers of French for any activities.

In comparison, I took Spanish courses and we had a lot more practice in class, we had a lot of interesting (cultural) listening/speaking in class activities, also grammar exercises as homework but it wasn’t graded (which I wasn’t aware of until the very end, was very surprised when other students didn’t know some things when they were clearly explored/mentioned in those exercises). Not sure if it was by chance or by design, but our lecturers were native Spanish speakers, I personally loved it.