There is no such thing as an “easy” or “hard” language. Babies learn languages at the same rate, whether it’s English, Chinese, or Spanish they’re learning. English is not more inherently difficult or easier than any other language.
The only way English can be called hard is if it is not related to your native language. Languages are grouped into families, and if a language is in the same family as your native language, it is generally easier to learn. Languages from totally unrelated families are harder. If you are a native Japanese speaker, for instance, learning English will be a challenge because it has a completely different system of writing, pronunciation, sentence structure, etc. A German speaker learning English won’t have as many problems, since the two languages are closely related.
This works the same way with any other language. If my native tongue is English, then I’m going to find Chinese a nightmare – tones, logograms, etc. are all totally unfamiliar. It’s not that Chinese is somehow more complicated, only that it is not what I am accoustomed to.
Language ranking systems rank languages according to your native language. So if your native tongue is Spanish, for example, the ranking system would go something like:
1: Italian, French, the other Romance languages.
2: Maybe Germanic languages like English and German.
3: Maybe Slavic languages like Russian.
4: Non-Indo-European languages like Japanese, Korean, etc.
Whereas a system that assumes your native language is English would go something like:
1: German, Frisian, other Germanic languages.
2: Romance languages like French which share a lot of the same vocabulary.
3: Slavic languages like Russian.
4: Non-Indo-European languages like Chinese, Turkish, etc.
As for English spelling, Mark Rosenfelder has an interesting article on the real rules of spelling English. They’re not quite as bizarre as you might think.
.:Nichol:.