French

France, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Monaco, and Quebec form the European and North American core. The largest French-speaking populations are in West and Central Africa: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Senegal, Madagascar, Burkina Faso, and many other countries use French in education, government, and media. African French speakers are projected to outnumber European ones for the rest of the century.

Many final consonants in French are silent — petit ends in a silent /t/. But when the next word starts with a vowel, that consonant resurfaces: petit ami sounds 'puh-tee-tah-mee'. The pattern is rule-bound but full of exceptions and frozen forms, and getting liaison right is one of the late-stage markers of fluent French.

Reading is unusually accessible — English absorbed roughly a third of its vocabulary from Norman French and Latin, so cognates are everywhere. The hard parts are pronunciation (nasal vowels, the French 'r', liaison), the gendered noun system with no reliable rule, and the verb system with subjunctive, conditional, and a host of compound tenses that map awkwardly onto English.

Same language, noticeably different prosody and vocabulary. Quebec French preserves older pronunciations the metropole has dropped (the 'oi' as 'wé' in older Quebec speech, for example), uses different colloquial words (char for car, magasiner for to shop), and has its own slang. Written French is largely shared. The two are mutually intelligible with some adjustment, especially the first time a Parisian hears Joual.

Yes, two: masculine and feminine. Every noun is one or the other, with adjectives and articles agreeing. Some endings hint at gender (-tion is usually feminine, -age usually masculine) but exceptions are everywhere and the gender of borrowed words is rarely predictable. Native speakers internalize gender as part of the noun itself.