The Trouble with France is......

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wrong.
English is a Germanic language. French is Latin- based, or a Romance language- akin to Italian, Spanish, and ( oddly enough) Romanian.

Although the Breton ( in the northwest tip of France) are Celitic speakers (in fact thier language is virtually indentical to Welsh).

The Romans conquered Gaul. The celtic inhabitants became assimilated to Roman Latin, and became the French.

When the Romans abandoned Britian in the age of Arthur, the Germanic tribes of North Germany and the netherlands (the Angles and Saxons) invaded and kicked the Celtic natives out of the best parts of Britain. The Germanic tribes became the English, the Celts became the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, and those Celts that fled across the channel to Brittany became the Breton.

The Island of Britain was later pillaged and conquered by Vikings from Scandavia.
The Norwejian and Danish Vikings are also Germanic in origin.

So the English started out as mish-mosh of two branches of Germanic: mainland Germanic and Scandavian. Very little Celtic influence, but some Latin influence.

Both the Celtic and Anglo Saxon peoples of Britain were conquored by the French speaking Normans in 1066.

French became the language of the Aristocracy of Britian for three hundred years.

The result was modern English: a choatic pastiche of two kinds of Germanic languages, church latin, and Latin-by-way-of-French.

All these influences caused english to loose complicated grammar, but caused it to have complicated spelling ( I can spell in Spanish as well as I can in my native english but I can barely speak spanish- Spanish is quite user-friendly on paper ).

But one thing you can be grateful for if you're a nonnative who has to learn English. Its the one European language that lost that gender thing!

You dont have to worry about what sexual gender inanimate objects are in English, like you do in virtually every other European language.