Well, I admit I do not speak a word of Spanish, but while I was studying in Taiwan, I lived with a Colombian guy who could speak Spanish (obviously), English, German, French, Japanese and Mandarin.
He felt English was pretty easy, and he, to his credit, is one of the few people, non-native or otherwise, whose English is good enough to make such a bold claim without it being ironic in any sense of the word, ether literal or otherwise. However, it should also be noted that this guy's father is an oil baron and so he was educated in both English and Spanish by a top private American institution from about the age of 4, so it is probably not that surprising that his English was very good. To my mind, English is only considered a simply language because most people have no idea just how incompetent their usage of it is, and those who do still lack any idea of how to sort it out because English is the only language have a come across where you can get four Cambridge/Oxford graduates, who are native speakers, arguing over the use of a comma before 'if'. In most languages this would be a pretty straight forward thing that anyone with their level of education should know, but due to the fact that in English both sides were and both sides were wrong, no one could decide which was the best option. (English's clusterfeck problem is due to several things I may write about tomorrow if I have time.)
=Furthermore, many forget that they have probably been learning English since they were four or five meaning their English will have massive advantage over any other second language they choose to learn.
Just to note, he was pretty convinced of the complexity of Spanish.
Anyway, he and I often spoke about languages and their varying degrees of complexity. We both conclusively agreed that Mandarin is piss easy, and that Cantonese is bat-shit insane.
French, on the face of it, is about the same level of complexity as English, but with far less anomalies and far harder pronunciation. (One area in which English is not difficult is pronunciation due to the lack of a 'real' standard pronunciation and variety of different accents both in individual dialects and worldwide. Furthermore, most people have such a high level of exposure to English, even in their early years, that they learn quite early on to recognise the sounds.)
German is again more complex than English on the face of it, but in truth it is a lot easier because although its standard rules are more difficult, its uniformity means once one has learnt German, then like with Chinese, they know German. (English is such a cluster feck that in that previous sentence that one word is has been grossly misused and yet still make sense. ^_- )
He maintained that Japanese grammar can feel difficult at times due to it being a sub, obj, verb structure, rather than a sub verb obj structure, but that it is still in truth rather simple. Japanese is very much helped by the fact that most of its cultural rules are written into the grammar, unlike with many European languages where it is all about context and dump luck. Haha.
That was our conclusions anyway.
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