The French language is full of irregularities and weird, complicated sentence constructions (try to negate something in a conditional past tense), and worst of all, so many flowers of speech, that francophones love to show off.

I also find spoken Spanish sentences much easier to parse.

For the record, I've put way, way more effort into French than I ever have into Spanish, including enough immersive higher-ed coursework that at one point I was dreaming in it pretty often.

[EDIT] I should add that my greatest annoyance with it is how hard it makes it to practice noun vocab in isolation, which is also kind of vital if you ever want to get past the problem. You can't just consistently practice the more general indefinite form because it's too often abbreviated ("l'au") so then when you go to make some damn adjective agree with it you're lost because you never actually learned the gender. Using the definite article fixes that problem but feels wrong, and never made the gender stick for me anyway. So you basically end up having to practice modifying them with adjectives to get good at nailing the gender every time. That's a fun friggin' Anki deck to put together. eyeroll

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agua#Usage_notes

However, there's another rule that words beginning with an a use el because of the double vowel sound.

“Centurión” (roman military rank) and “esturión” (fish) are masculine