How do you define difficulty of learning languages? Amount of grammar rules and exceptions? Well, for example English only has "the" in front of nouns. Swedish has "Det" and "Den". German has "Der", "Das", "Die". Obviously many languages have even more. Exceptions to rules aren't that bad, what is bad is when the basic rules are numerous and difficult to remember. In my opinion as a non-native English speaker, this is not the case with English. I really fail to see why English would be any harder than the other ~3000 languages out there. Sure, for those who do not speak another indoeuropean language it is going to be difficult to learn it. The same could be said for any other language and family of languages. Also, for the record, unprounced letters exist in most languages. For the first thing: Dutch no longer use falls, except in some old expressions.. Fortunately. Latvian, if I remember correctly, has 14 falls! My dialect (west-flemish) still has some kind of falls to it. As for exceptions: English is like NOTHING compared to french. And german is like the opposite: Pretty much have rules for everything there. I find english EASY to be honest. But I think, for a foreigner, dutch is rather hard to learn... And I can confirm: dutch, french, and german also have unpronounced letters.