French is harder than German

Andrew asked me whether French or German is harder, and I told him French. However, I've seen it said (by some "study") that there are four levels of difficulty in language (for english-speakers), and easiest contained Dutch and French, second easiest contained German, and most difficult included most asian languages etc. Generally this made sense, and I can see why German could be seen as harder than French for the following reasons:
1) German has fewer words in common with English than does French. Therefore, one spends more time learning vocab.
2) German grammar is, let's say "harder" than English and French. There are more words for "the", word order is different to English, however internally it is very consistent and logical, which is different to French and German.

I would argue against this, however, I would argue that French is one of the most difficult languages to learn, just under English in general, because they are both complicated, full of exceptions to each rule and idosyncratic in the formation of phrases. I would argue that French is harder than German for english speakers for the following reasons:
1) because french has influenced english language so much, there are many "false friends". Words we have taken from french are not used exactly as they were in the native tongue. As an english speaker, learning french is like relearning your vocab in english. Words are not used in the exact same contexts as in english. In German, this seems to be less the case.
2) The way you express things in French is different to English. The bits of speech that you use are different to get a certain meaning. French words have multiple translations that seem unconnected in English. German had some of this, but nowhere near as much. German is very much like old english. The word order is different, but which typoes of words, ie adjective or noun or preposition, are the same as in English. I would say learning old english is helpful for german and learning latin is helpful for french.

Finally, both are easier than Indonesian. This is because, although Indonesian is a really simple language gramatically, it is much more foreign to English then french or german so the rules we know don't apply, and 99% of the vocab is foreign.

Obviously "easy" and "difficult" here have a double meaning of both: complex, as in whether the grammar and connections between words is logical and consistent, or there are numerous exceptions to rules, and also familiar, as in it's easy to learn something that's close to what you already know. I am generalising between the two and switching back and forth now and then when I talk to "easy" or "difficult".