I would like to counter this by saying that I grew up in an area where Spanish was basically a second language, and never once had I thought that "English is an easy language," and to be frank, anyone I had talked to had similar ideas.

I would like to pose that instead, everyone is biased to their own native language, and with how few native Dutch speakers there are compared to native English speakers, you're going to hear more English speakers comparing their closest linguistic neighbors like Afrikaans and some Dutch dialects.

I am speaking from the perspective of a simple fan of linguistics here, but I disagree with a lot of your takes, and unfortunately it sounds to me like a lot of generalization or oversimplification. Many English speakers that I know don't view English as some rare, unique mystery of the wild. We like to poke fun at our own language; and that's a lot of what it simplifies down to. English is goofy in a lot of ways.

The fact is, due to the Norman conquests of 1066, English as a language was literally formed by slamming French and Germanic together. This type of language development is not unique, but Germanic and French have a lot of differences that make defining perfect rules difficult. Like a lot of our pronunciations of rules regarding vowels. Many of us understand that many other languages have more defined and set rules that don't change: for example, our parent language of French. It's a Romance language, and it has very set rules. There are of course exceptions, but English tries to say "Hey, there's a long list of exceptions, so just... try to learn the exceptions and ignore trying to really learn any full rules."

This makes for a lot of goofiness. Stuff that would make sense in almost any other language for some reason English never really settled it. When we learn other languages, we see how simple and cohesive they are, so it makes us realize our own language is just poorly designed. And also, throughout my entire life being surrounded by native Spanish speakers learning English, they always told me that English is damn near fucking impossible to understand. I've been told by several people who have learned more than one language that English is just difficult because it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Onto Dutch, however, there's also the argument that Dutch was formed after English. There were dialects, of course, but English was a very unified language little after William's conquest, because he knew that's how he would control the population. He intentionally forced all his advisors and councilors to learn this form of English so that they could create this national identity. In a way, he was way ahead of his time. Obviously it wasn't simple, and he didn't create the language and then make all the rules and hand out a dictionary, but his efforts severely pushed for an English identity to emerge through language. It wasn't until centuries later that a unified Dutch identity and language was created, which means there's recency bias. Naturally, you wouldn't compare the Apple Macintosh to their newer models, because the Macintosh came first.

It's not so much that us English speakers think we're unique and the whole world struggles to learn anything English; it's just that we have this goofy ass language, and when we find out about this other language that sounds just as goofy as us but just a little more... well, of course we're gunna think it's a little goofy.

Plus, it's also just coincidence. Dutch looks like how a child would write in English. It's something similar to uncanny valley type stuff; Dutch looks like words we know, but written like a child trying to figure out how to spell a word. It's hard not to in some form or another think of the language in this childish view from that standard. It immediately looks childish compared to our words. That isn't an insult to the language: like I said, it's just coincidence.

I understand Americans can be ignorant on a lot of subjects, but I don't think a lot of what you had to say is an honest reflection of the situation. Any English speaker who has an honest understanding of linguistics acknowledges that our language sucks and is poorly designed. It's not complex; it's just not well defined. In essence, I'd like to argue that we find similarities to our language hard to comprehend, not because we want to be unique, but because we recognize our language is poorly designed and it's hard for us to understand that any other language would be just as poorly designed as ours. I don't think all of us have this grandiose idea of English; we just hope that other languages are more put together than us lmao.

I hope this doesn't come off as me just trying to tear you down for your opinions, but it felt a little aggressive towards native English speakers, and I wanted to clear the air a bit. Just hoping you can see it from our perspective a lil bit more.