Hello fellow Indian. This is very similar to my linguistic capabilities if you substitute Japanese for the bit of French I learnt in school / college 30 years ago. Ok, I can't really follow someone when they speak French, but I can read it well enough even now.
Nice. I know every language is pretty difficult mostly, but as someone who's had a hard time learning Hindi after realising it uses the same script and yet is a different language from Marathi, French just blows my fucking mind.
In my experience, it was reasonably simple to learn how to read / write French. We had it in school for 3 years and then college for a couple of years. The emphasis was on reading / writing and not so much on speaking / listening, though I remember we had to recite some French poetry once. The teacher's ears must have fallen of hearing our impeccable accents :D
Definitely is. I forgot the actual name of the writing style, but for children's books it is also not uncommon to have kanji with their hiragana transliteration above/beside it. Requiring someone to immediately write kanji when they learn japanese, especially as a secondary+ language is insane