Thank the gods he wasn’t watching “Kath and Kim”…! 
I’m not sure I’d say that there’s no way to compare difficulty in learning languages. This is especially true if you break it down into categories. For example, in spelling and pronunciation, English has plenty of words that don’t sound like they’re spelled, and of the spelling rules that do exist, there are countless exceptions. For contrast, Spanish has pretty rigid pronunciation rules, so once you learn them you’ll encounter exceptions far far less than in English.
The conjugation rules for verbs are similar. -ed is the “rule” for making verbs past tense, but I could probably rattle off 20 verbs without pause that break this rule. In Japanese, there are maybe 2 or 3 verbs that don’t conjugate precisely as dictated by a rule.
This isn’t to say that Japanese (or Spanish) is necessarily more difficult to learn than English, but I think that if you look at the categories that structure a language and look at the rules that govern it, the more exceptions to those rules that there are the harder the language will be to learn. English just happens to have a particularly high rate of exceptions to rules.
As to your point about certain languages being easier to learn for speakers of certain other languages, it’s very true. But I don’t think that means that you can’t call some languages more difficult to learn than others.
Please allow me to disagree with that statement. In my experience as a native French speaker who has studied a bit of Latin and Spanish, English has a number of advantages that make it simpler, overall, to speak and write, than many languages:
-No gender (and often number) accordance rules: in French, Spanish, and many other languages, every noun has a gender (masculine, feminine, and sometimes neutral) For example, in French, a truck is a masculine word, whereas a car is feminine. All articles and adjectives that qualify a noun must match it in gender and number. This requires different spelling and pronunciation.
-Verb conjugation is much simpler in English. There are comparatively fewer tenses, and within a tense many of the persons are spelled identically: i.e. I go, you go, he/she/it goes, we go, you go, they go. In French, Spanish and many other languages, each person is spelled differently. In addition, in English the second person (you) is identical regardless of whether it’s singular or plural.
-No declensions: some languages, like Latin, German, and Russian, also have declensions, which can be roughly compared to having to conjugate nouns (just like verbs) according to the function of the noun in the sentence. So if a noun is subject to a verb, it’s spelled (and pronounced) one way (nominative case), if it’s the direct object of the verb (i.e. I hit the ball) it’s spelled another way (accusative case), and so on.
So perhaps you can count yourself luck that you do not have to learn French, or worse, German or Russian.
That being said, as mentioned above, you should probably try to acquire the American “midwest” accent. It is considered the most " neutral" English, and is the one you will hear most newscasters and reporters use. When most Americans, and Canadians for that matter, say that someone has “no accent” they mean that they have the midwest accent. This is also why major companies often locate national call centers in the midwest, so their agents will be easily understood from Northern Maine down to Alabama.
I seem to recall a study done in the…I want to say the 90’s which concluded that Korean is the most difficult language to learn as a native speaker, because the age at which core structures are mastered is the latest. Korean children are not expected to master…er, something about use of reflexive pronouns until the age of 5.
I do recall that the British government did a different kind of study and concluded that Hungarian is the most difficult language for a native speaker of English to learn to speak correctly, as measured by the time it takes to teach it to them. (I read about the two studies at the same time, other than in my mind they are not connected).
I realize this is weak and possibly someone who knows what they are talking about will come along soon and help me out.
My parents are native speakers of Hungarian. Over the course of their lifetime, they have had to learn, to varying degrees of fluency, Russian, German, English and French.
The easiest of them to learn was English, they said. At least to get to the level to be able to communicate with people at a basic level.
Ed
IMHO, British English and American English are barely different dialects, if at all. The quoted definition specifically excludes accents (which only differ in pronunciation). And as far as I know, in written British vs American, there is almost no difference: maybe a couple dozen vocabulary words and a dozen or so differing uses of prepositions. It’s not like I can tell from the language alone whether a book has an English or American author, at least unless I run across one of the couple dozen words.
They really do? I saw that on Flight of the Conchords and wondered whether it was made up for the show or not.
Well, of course they do. Australians and New Zealanders are like adolescent siblings, who know each others’ weaknesses too well, and regularly insult each other, without meaning any real harm (unless it’s about something of real importance, like cross-Tasman cricket or rugby).
They are united in their hatred of the English, though.
No, it’s very true, but all in good fun and good-natured.
And you’re only allowed to participate if you’re an Australian or a Kiwi; unlike the Poms vs The Frogs thing, in which everyone is allowed to join in. 
First, although I find Wikipedia very useful as a first-look source, it is not authoritative (for anything). But suppose I concede the definition. Wouldn’t you also have to agree then, that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of dialects within the US? I wonder if someone from L.A. and someone from Brooklyn could even understand each other. 
Yes, there are. Saying so is a bit like saying the sky is blue.
-FrL-
In my youth, I read that the onset of radio in the early 20th century is what kept the different regional accents and ways of speaking from turning into Chinese-style dialects. Radio tied the language together for the entire country. I’m not sure I believe that, it seems a little too simplistic, but there could be a grain of truth there. Even in Thailand, which is about the size of Texas, there are four distinct regional dialects and numerous subdialects, and only the younger generations can widely speak and understand the central Thai that is broadcast on television and taught in schools. (All TV emanates from Bangkok; there are no local stations.)
I haven’t heard of those studies, but the Defense Language Institute (part of the US Dept of Defense) classifies language difficulty for English speakers into 4 categories based on how many hours of study it takes before a speaker of English becomes… um, something in the language. Not fluent, maybe just acquiring basic communication. I can’t find it on that page, but I seem to remember that’s what the categories mean.
The Cat IV languages are Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. I’d be curious to see what that’s based on, because the Japanese writing system’s a bitch, whereas Korean’s is a cinch. Neither one is a tonal language, but Chinese is. I don’t know much about Arabic.
If people from LA and Brooklyn cannot understand one another, I suspect that would be down to accent rather than dialect.
The wikipedia definition quoted above suggests that in common usage “accent” and “dialect” are almost interchangeable. While that may be true for AmE, I don’t think it is generally true for other varieties of English. Accent and dialect are quite distinct concepts.
Someone who speaks a particular dialect which is not mine will usually also have a particular accent which is not mine, but the reverse is certainly not true. HibE speakers, to choose a variety of English which which I am familiar, have a wide variety of accents which are sufficiently different as to sometimes impede understanding, but they all use the same dialect.
As a rough rule of thumb, if I can’t telll from reading a substantial text written by another user of English that he and I use different varietiess of language, then he and I probably share a dialect, or at most we have very narrowly-differentiated dialects. But his accent might be completely impenetrable to me, and vice versa.
The Wikipedia definition points this out as an example of frequent non-technical use of the terms, but is also quite specific about how technical use of the terms is distinguished. Though I am not convinced it is correct even about how frequently the terms are used interchangeably in non-technical contexts… but still, it could be. Certainly, you do occasionally hear people speaking that way.
That having been said, regional differences in accent are differences in dialect, technically. Dialect covers all the features of a regional variety of a language, including accentual features.
Both of these examples are mentioned in Wikipedia’s article on Hardest Language
True, dialect embraces accent. But a dialect cannot consist of accentual differences only, any more than an automobile can consist of wheels alone. If the difference between two users of English comes down solely or predominantly to accent, I don’t think they would normally be said to have different dialects - except by some AmE speakers, which is the point I was making. I think the dialect/accent blurring is a feature of AmE.
Yes, they could. They’d be speaking different dialects, not different languages.
There is a certain amount of blurring between those distinctions sometimes - the old adage of ‘a language is a dialect with its own army and navy’ - but that doesn’t mean that dialects don’t exist.
If you don’t think that even the US and UK have seperate dialects*, then what’s your definition of dialect?
My stepdad, from Yorkshire says “tha’sen” for “yourself” and “art” for “are” when used with thee, thou, and tha’sen. I come from Essex, and don’t use those grammatical forms. We do not speak the same dialect. My friend from Florida says ‘y’all’ for a plural of ‘you’ but my friend from New York does not. They do not speak the same dialect.
There is blurring between what’s an accent and what’s a dialect, but not so much that dialects don’t exist. That’d be like saying that, since there’s blurring between yellow and orange, that the colour orange doesn’t exist, but you try telling that to Orangemen in Northern Ireland, Tibetan monks, or even fashion designers!
*Many different dialects, really.
As a theatre person, I’m often a little amused when actors from Britain or who speak English as a second language choose to learn to speak English with a New York accent, figuring that would be the most “normal”. US Western or Midwestern is probably the most ordinary American accent, and intelligible to the greatest number of Americans; it’s the default on television unless the actor wants to make a statement that he or she is from New Yawk, Joysey, Vuhginia, or Fahr-go, Nort’ Dakohta.