English is not normal

As a native English speaker whose first written language was Spanish and who has studied and spoken German, Italian, and Cantonese, it has always seemed to me that English is one of the easier common languages for conveying simple meaning in a small number of words. With a vocabulary of two or three hundred words you can reasonably speak Pidgin English to accomplish basic tasks like asking directions, ordering food, and buying daily items. With a romance language (let alone a character-based language), you realistically need about five to ten times more words to do the same thing. This is especially true for languages with formulaic conjugation and gendered nouns. My point is not that English is better or more flexible. My point is actually that English is often ambiguous and that new speakers can use that ambiguity to convey a lot of meaning compactly. However, that ambiguity also means that fluency is hard to come by because you need to understand context and custom well enough to choose the right meaning of words that could realistically have dozens of separate and contradictory meanings. Basically, the barrier to entry is low but the barrier to fluency is high and hard to overcome.

> almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

Persian is Indo-European and does not assign genders that way either.

> There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao

Only because we've arbitrarily decided that all of the English dialects are a single language. Texas Southern English and Newfoundland English are not significantly more mutually intelligible than Spanish and Portuguese. Scots and Singlish are considered English dialects but are barely intelligible to many English speakers.