Personally, I have never heard French described as the most difficult
language. A language's
difficulty is
relative anyway; learning
German is probably easier for a
European than it is for a
Japanese person, for example.
The fact that a language has numerous verb conjugations does not necessarily make it difficult or strange. English is actually the oddball in European languages in that its verbs are relatively uninflected. Spanish, commonly described by English speakers as easier than French, actually has more a more complicated verb system than does French, and Portuguese and Italian are even more so. Chinese has no verb conjugations whatsoever and I imagine that it is harder to for English-speaking people to learn than any Indo-European language.