I don't really speak French, but I can comprehend basic written French. I had a hard time understanding spoken French. The only (part) French song that I can sing fairly well is the bilingual version of O Canada.
Growing up outside the French diaspora, I thought of learning French never came to my mind. And I found it's hard to pronounce French word. My first exposure to French is actually some Canadian cartoon like Angela Anaconda. It's in English but I can't understand why the main antagonist's surname (Manoir) is pronounced as Mah-nwa. Another cartoon, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There's a minor character called Frahn-swa... It took me 5 years to realize that it is spelled as Francois. The good old days, growing up watching funny Canadian cartoon like Angela Anaconda, Freaky Stories and Yvon of Yukon. Oggy and the cockroaches is a French cartoon but not a single French word was uttered throughout the whole episode.
As I grow older, I wanted to learn Latin but Latin is a dead language. And in this region, nobody cares about Latin. So I decided to learn some Romance language. Spanish is quite common as America Latin Telenovelas are frequently aired here. Dubbed or with subtitles. Furthermore, there are lots of Spanish loanword in Tagalog. We had a copy of English -Tagalog dictionary in our house. It is a present from my aunt. I am always intimidated by French. They seem hard to learn.
One day, my best friend introduced my to a girl. She can speak basic French. She is just being humble. So finally, I had somebody to practice/learn a bit of French.
In my opinion, before learning French, one should learn Italian. Orthographically, Italian is more familiar to me. And Italian and French shares similar lexicon (Lexical similarity).
Like Rome, French is not built in a day.
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