seeing some "english is the hardest language to learn" discourse on the tl so ill add my grain of salt, as someone who's finishing up a degree majoring in english - grammar phonetics n all that

firstly, no language is easy to learn. unless you were raised multilingual, you will have to make a lot of efforts to learn any new language, esp if you're older.

english can seem easy to people whose first language is a germanic language, like german, dutch or swedish, because it's the same language family as english. overall, most people whose first language is from the indo-european family wont have drastic difficulties learning english

however there's over a dozen language families, all very different! ethnolinguistics and the study of proto-languages r very interesting subjects but for short : depending on your mother language, english could be a lot harder or easier for you.

english is usually thought of being easy because you can easily "wing it" : its grammar is quite flexible, and even grammatically incorrect english doesn't usually sound horrible. it's because english is mostly focused on nouns, as opposed to other languages focused on verbs

( like french, for example) in english verb tenses are formed through aspects : be + ing, have + en etc, which makes it both easy (not much to remember in terms of grammar rules) and hard (the time of enunciation and contexts are crucial)

example : i eat an apple. you can make up pretty much every tense out of this sentence by just adding be or have or the preterit tense, or add will for the future tense. but see how many variation that can give you, and how they all mean slightly different things :

and it's complicated to explain precisely when to use one form over the other. you're tempted to wing it, but it requires an already confident level of english for it to flow naturally enough. plus these aspects are very precise and dont always have equivalents in other languages

even indo-european languages. but that's only one small fraction : let's talk phonetics and pronunciation now :)

take a look at the ipa ( international phonetic alphabet) chart. the ipa is a system of symbols attached to sounds, like vowels or consonants. see the difference between the english ipa chart and the french ipa chart?

english has many more vowels than most other indo-european languages. take this other comparison, a bit clearer, comparing spanish vowels to english vowels :

overall, english is a language that might seem easy on the surface, but when you scratch a bit and try to actually understand why it's constructed the way it is, it's actually rather complex and a bit confusing :)