French has been an important language on the world stage. Much of English vocabulary comes from French (or a shared Latinate origin) as French has historically been a much sought after language for its use in learning, diplomacy, art, literature, and more.
Some things I've noticed about French...
Compared with Spanish and Italian, French is like English and German in that it distinguishes many different vowel qualities. French makes ample use of nasal vowels—if you hold your nose shut and try to speak French, you will not feel good.
The phenomena of liason in French makes words "run together". French sounds "smooth" rather than "choppy" as its phonology makes for many vowels, only relatively simple consonant clusters, and regular stress patterns.
Written French makes more distinctions than spoken French—in this way French is similar to the East Asian languages with their Chinese characters.
Visiting wiktionary and searching English words of Latin origin, you are likely to encounter some French middle-man. Let's try searching "encounter"; here's the etymology—
From Middle English encountren, from rom Anglo-Norman encountrer, Old French encontrer (“to confront”), from encontre (“against, counter to”), from Late Latin incontrā (“in front of”) itself from Latin in (“in”) + contrā (“against”).
The modern French language has related words like encontre (preposition) "against", as in Elle va à l'encontre des réalités sociales et économiques.
I learned basic pronunciation of French words because they kept popping up all over the place in stuff I was reading. Then, I went over grammar basics.
I would argue that learning French will probably be the easiest foreign language for a speaker of English. If you don't get lost in the minutae of grammar and just consoom lots of French (audio, reading) I think you can very quickly gain a passive understanding of French. Combined with some more in-depth study, you should be able to write enough French to debate people over the Internet.
For English speakers, I suggest using the United States International keyboard layout with French. You can also use this keyboard to type other languages, such as German. You don't need to buy a fancy new keyboard with more buttons or anything.
To quickly enjoy the benefits of learning some foreign language, French is an excellent choice for English speakers. It will be familiar enough that you can achieve enough proficiency to read texts and look up words you don't know without much difficulty. It will help you understand English better (many words come from French). Many, many things are translated into French as it has been a popular 2nd language for at least a couple hundred years.