[jamil7]

From my perspective, despite inconsistencies it's one of the easier languages to learn at a basic level as you can ramp up and start using a working subset of it pretty quickly. German in comparison has a steep up-front learning curve and requires a lot of investment to get anything out of.

[kaesar14]

I'd just like to point out that everyone saying English is easy to learn in this thread is from a self-selecting population that's good enough at the language to participate on this forum.

For this example specifically though, I do agree with other comments saying the "MVP" of English is quite small, but frankly English is just everywhere. Comme quelqu'en qui apprend le français maintenant, it's just hard to find content to immerse myself with in America, and that's with one of the most popular languages in the world. Could you say the same of English, in almost anywhere else in the world?

[acjohnson55]

Yep. It's an easy language to speak on a functional level, but very difficult to master on a native level. Lots of native speakers never master all the nuances.

[jamil7]

> but very difficult to master on a native level

The same can be said for all of the languages being discussed in this thread. I'm skeptical that English is any harder to learn at a native level than French, German or Polish.

[Koshkin]

I say, on the phonological level at least, French, German, and even Polish are easy. Their phonetics, both the consonants and the vowels, are straightforward. English, in contrast, is out of this world. (Its origin lies in the language of an island nation, after all.) So much so that it looks like their neighbors, the French, have huge difficulty with English pronunciation (and native English speakers, especially the Americans, seem all too happy to return the favor - their atrocious French pronunciation is, in fact, what they are taught, just look at the transcription of French words in conversation guides, it is amazing how bad it is, ‘é’ is transcribed as ‘ay’, etc.)

[ziml77]

It doesn't help that we screw with the pronunciation of loan words and then label anyone who pronounces them properly pretentious.

One of the worst destructions of foreign pronunciation has to be Notre Dame. It hurts me to say "noter dayme". More recently, having to pronounce La Croix as "lah croy" has also been annoying. But unfortunately for both of those it's objectively wrong to pronounce them the French way since they are proper nouns and whoever is using that proper noun defines how it is pronounced when referring to them.

[euroderf]

In the same vein, "Formula One" has come to replace "Grand Prix", which probably got mangled a lot.