Yeah, the colloquial language and puns and such make some French comics harder too. In my school you could pick between French and Latin in grade 7, and then in ninth grade the crazy overachieving people who liked languages (i.e. not me) could pick Italian or Spanish (I think) in cooperation with another school, and then in 11th grade you could pick French or Latin up again if you had the other before, and then there were some optional offerings starting in 11th grade too, like you could learn Arabic, which I think was rather popular because a bunch of people already knew it from their Koran classes so they had a headstart (even with the classic vs modern spoken issues and such), and hoped for an easy good grade.