Yeah, French is the same as Spanish in that inanimate objects somehow have a sex. It helps that I'm fluent in spanish, but French is still hard to me. I'm 28 now so giving it another try would be incredibly hard.

I know that I live in a Mexican neighborhood where everything is available to you in Spanish. You are insulated in this little world and thus there is no need to learn English. Thus, you get a large portion of Latino immigrants who don't see a need to learn English, which is really sad and unfortunate.