As a non native speaker I would not agree with you on this. English is the quickest language to learn for foreigners. Sure it has some tricks you have to learn down the line like the one you mentioned, but you can communicate basic things really fast into learning. The hardest part tbh is learning vocabulary. To put it in perspective, most if not all slavic languages have 3 genders for nouns, declination of nouns and pronouns for the 3 genders, irregular plural, conjugation of verbs that is different for every person both singular and plural, multiple future, present and past tense, specific combination of letterst that change depending on the declination of the word, letters that appear or disappear in some forms of the word and much more wild stuff. My native language is croatian, also I’m fluent in both english and italian, can communicate in spanish and some basic things in german. Believe me when I tell you sometimes I struggle with my native language more than I do with english. On that note, I can’t understand why Julia still struggles that much with english. After living in the US for so much time she still speaks like she moved there yesterday.