Is English an easy language to learn?

I'm a native speaker, but I love learning languages. I've always wondered what the hardest things are for people who aren't native English speakers. Whether it be certain accents, words, phrases that don't make sense, etc. So ESL Learners, what's the most difficult thing about English for you? How did you all learn to speak English so perfectly? I would think that 95% of you guys are native English speakers by the way that you write. What's more surprising is that some of you come from countries in which I've heard most of the population speaks little to no English, so I'm very curious as to how you all learned it so well. I was mostly just asking out of curiosity because the few people I know who speak more than one language either learned it when they were young from family or learned it on their own later on because U.S. schools don't do a good job with foreign languages.

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ArishMell · 70-79, M Best Comment

I am not sure how it can be compared in that way.

It has a very broad vocabulary drawn from many languages over some 2000 years. These include Latin, Greek, German, French, Scandinavian; more recently (last few centuries) Indian and other Asian languages; and nowadays a lot of Americana - which tends to ignore etymology with a very few, rather peculiar results. Plus others: [i]algebra[/i] is close to its Arabic root, for example

This polyglotism gives English many of curious spelling and pronounciation results - e.g.:

- [i]Ruff[/i] and [i]rough[/i] rhyme with each other and with [i]tough[/i], but not with [i]through[/i].

- [i]Through [/i]rhymes with [i]too, two[/i] and [i]to[/i]) but not [i]or bough[/i]

- [i]Bough[/i] rhymes with [i]bow[/i] the gesture but not [i]bow[/i] the knot, which rhymes with [i]no[/i].

The language has a lot of formal grammar rules, as most languages do, and they allow you to write very elegant, accurate, clear [i]text[/i], and to [i]speak[/i] very accurately, mellifluously and concisely; but taken too far they can make everyday speech sound a bit stilted.

On the other hand, English does not assign genders to nouns, as happens in French. It does have irregular verbs but the verb constructions generally are fairly straightforwards.

Neither does English have generic and familiar forms of the personal address [i]you[/i], as in German and French.

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Just to make it more fun, the British Isles encompass four native languages of which one, Welsh, is still spoken and written widely if only within Wales; and even just the English of England comprises many accents and dialects.