People talk of "difficult" languages in absolute terms, but there is always the question of where one is coming from.
English shares a significant amounts of structure and words with French, so French ends up being relatively straightforward to learn for a motivated English speaker - the only real difference is the amount of tenses, which OP unsurprisingly still struggles with. I bet you, as a French speaker, would grasp Italian very quickly - much faster than most Chinese likely ever will.
German ended up sharing much less with Romance languages, so it stands to reason that it would take 2x-3x the effort of going from English to French.
English shares a significant amounts of structure and words with French, so French ends up being relatively straightforward to learn for a motivated English speaker - the only real difference is the amount of tenses, which OP unsurprisingly still struggles with. I bet you, as a French speaker, would grasp Italian very quickly - much faster than most Chinese likely ever will.
German ended up sharing much less with Romance languages, so it stands to reason that it would take 2x-3x the effort of going from English to French.