By whom? I don’t think it would be hard for a person who knows a language from Standard Average European Sprachbund to learn English compared to, say, Chinese, Arabic or Bengali.
Most recent one I encountered was a non-native speaker on a comment thread saying "childs" instead of "children", and there's really no general rule about english grammar that would indicate "ren" being the pluralizing qualifier here. You just have to memorize these things.
How do you pronounce "read"? That depends on if you interpreted the word as past tense or present tense. How do you pronounce "lead"? That depends on if you interpreted the word as the heavy metal or the verb meaning taking charge of an effort. The "o" in lose sounds exactly like the one in choose, but the "o" in loose sounds nothing like the one in chose.
Irregularities are not hard to master, it is one of the easiest things actually, it's rote memorization. For someone whose native language is without articles it would be a struggle to learn a language with them for the first time. Or, for an English native speaker it would be really hard to learn how to construct naturally-sounding Japanese sentences.
If instead of being concerned with articles, tenses, relative clause positioning, noun-verb argreement, topic and focus expression, morphosyntactic alignment, negative coordination, discourse markers, grammatical mood, grammatical genders / noun classes, coverbs, preverbs, measure words, etc you are being concerned with how to pronounce read, it means you learn an easy language (for you), because, probably, your native language shares lots of features with English.
Old English weak noun declension. Hence brethren, oxen, children. Which are the only three examples in common use, so it's easier to learn as an exception.
The change in vowels found in several "irregular" inflections are also holdovers from Germanic vowel changes. For example mouse/mice or goose/geese (for nouns), or sing/sang/sung (for vowels). But again, these are usually taught as lists of exceptions rather than trying to educate people as to the etymology to figure out how to inflect it correctly.
We've done a great disservice to the language by adopting foreign words and then insisting on inflecting them according to the foreign inflection patterns... and sometimes mangling even that (cf. 'octopus', where people sometimes insist that the proper Latin plural is 'octopi' when it is in fact 'octopodes').
The comparison with Chinese, Arabic or Bengali is a bit unfair since the first hurdle is to learn the writing. But there are plenty of phonetic (phonemic) languages/writing systems that at least make it easier to pronounce even if you have no idea what you're saying, just as long as you understand the alphabet and the sound each letter corresponds to.
Better example. Read "c" in "Changes in science of Pacific Ocean".
The "ch" is pretty much always read "tʃ" instead of individual letters. And I think "ci" is also pretty much always pronounced as "si" (Pacific, specific, city, scarcity, etc.).
As an individual letter yes it changes but you can find a semblance of a rule when using the ch vs. ci examples.
Fun read: Ghoti is a creative respelling of the word fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
English is easy to understand, hard to master. Here's an example especially with American Stress.
Imagine that each capitalized word is stressed, this changes the meaning of the sentence.
I did not say he stole the money. i DID not say he stole the money. i did NOT say he stole the money. i did not SAY he stole the money. i did not say HE stole the money. i did not say he STOLE the money. i did not say he stole THE money. i did not say he stole the MONEY.
These mean different things.
Outside of the stress, there are different words for things which depends on the context. poop, fecal matter, feces, shit, stool, poo, manure, dung, droppings, excrement, etc.
Chinese and Arabic are different. They are different because of the written form. Folks feel the same about Japanese, till they see it written out with roman letters. Chinese is tough for English speakers because of the tones, but not for those coming from a tonal language. English is hard for those coming from a tonal language, but not those coming from a stressed and intonation based singing language.
So, like, any other langauge with a literary tradition?
>I did not say he stole the money. i DID not say he stole the money. i did NOT say he stole the money. i did not SAY he stole the money. i did not say HE stole the money. i did not say he STOLE the money. i did not say he stole THE money. i did not say he stole the MONEY.
No person who knows a SAE language would be confused by this, they would probably understand the meaning naturally without it even being explained to them as a rule.
>Chinese and Arabic are different. They are different because of the written form. Folks feel the same about Japanese
Learning a writing system takes like 2 weeks at most, it is a drop in the bucket considering that you would need ~88 weeks to be professionally proficient in Japanese compared to, say, ~24 weeks for Spanish.
>Folks feel the same about Japanese, till they see it written out with roman letters.
While lots of sentences that sound natural in Spanish may sound almost as natural in English, one-to-one Japanese translation would sound completely off and vice versa.
While this is an interesting example, it doesn't really say much about relative difficulty of English.
E.g., in Korean, the most basic way to say the sentence would be:
> (money)-(object marker) (steal)-(past tense)-(quote) (no) (say)-(past tense)
The beauty of it is that it doesn't say who said what or who stole the money - it's all inferred from the context! (You can even get rid of "money" if it's obvious.) But you have to get the politeness level right, of which there are at least four, or six if you are old-fashioned. Plus a bunch of optional verb endings to denote surprise, annoyance, confidence, etc.
Difficulty is in the eyes of the beholder.
If the media around us would be, let’s say Spanish, i’d think a lot of people would learn it faster than english.
Of historical languages, English is no more a struggle than French. It might be harder than Italian or Spanish, but it's a walk in the park compared to e.g. Hungarian, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, and most other languages...
Languages are tools to everyday communication. Why do we keep using historical clunky tools when we are able to create far better ones?
By the way, Esperanto is a popular neutral pragmatic choice. I would be fine with a any well-made community driven tool. For example, I am fond of Ido's digraphs. I think it is easier than Esperanto or French's diacritics.
Because we're not mere computers or animals, to only care about the most efficient communication of commands, facts, and numbers, but we also have a history (reflected in our words and language), a culture (ditto), a literature, poetry, idiom, and song -- all the way to ancestors who spoke the same language, and successor who will carry it forward.