really threw me off when learning French. I went from the mostly benign and spelling-only prescriptivism of Spanish to the complete and utter anarchy that is English to this weird situation French is in where it's the worst of both worlds: it has all of the rules and all of the exceptions.

In some situations following all of the rules ('course a pied' over 'running' type stuff) will make you positively odd, and in others ignoring some specific rules makes you sound uncultured.