(I’m a native Italian speaker with very fluent English and a smattering of Spanish and Irish; I studied French and Latin in high school but I’ve since forgotten most of them.)
Well, grammar-wise English is way easier than most other European languages (though way harder than creoles, Indonesian, or engineered languages), but the phonology is not that simple even by central/northern European standards (let alone by southern European or Asian standards), and the spelling-to-pronunciation “rules” are about as bad as they could be. (As a result, it’s much easier to learn to write English than to speak it, and there are lots of people who would be hard to identify as non-native speakers in formal writing but would be quite hard to understand when speaking.)
(I’m a native Italian speaker with very fluent English and a smattering of Spanish and Irish; I studied French and Latin in high school but I’ve since forgotten most of them.)
Well, grammar-wise English is way easier than most other European languages (though way harder than creoles, Indonesian, or engineered languages), but the phonology is not that simple even by central/northern European standards (let alone by southern European or Asian standards), and the spelling-to-pronunciation “rules” are about as bad as they could be. (As a result, it’s much easier to learn to write English than to speak it, and there are lots of people who would be hard to identify as non-native speakers in formal writing but would be quite hard to understand when speaking.)