Is English a difficult language to learn to speak (non-native speakers please)?

Depends on the country. Even though I come from an extremely backwards country, we are lucky enough to have most of our adult programming subtitled rather than dubbed. Couple that with the fact that I love reading and listening to music, and English was actually pretty easy to pick up, or at least the spoken/heard part of it. I also have a good ear for accents, which helps me grasp the different ways the language can sound and the different slangs each accent uses.

Where I've had problems was in the so-called "Use of English" part (i.e. grammar). This is because I'm very intuitive when learning (I go with "what looks/sounds right") and therefore cannot be arsed to memorize the rules for the 23.000.000 English verb tenses. If you asked me what the difference is between Present Continuous and Present Perfect Continuous, I would have no idea; but if you asked me to tell you if it was more correct to use "I will go to the pool today" or "I will be going to the pool today" in any given context, then I could tell you and be 100% sure that what I was saying was actually right.

I hope I am making sense. English was easy for me to pick up because I surrounded myself with lots of it and took classes at the British Council (if I had learned in school, I would still be stuck at baby level; even though I took seven years of it in scbool I only really started "learning" it properly in university). However, for countries where EVERYTHING is translated or dubbed (i.e. Italy, Spain, France) I believe it will be harder, because they can't immerse themselves so much.

However, on a scale of 1/10, where Spanish is a 1 and German is an 8 or 9, I'd say English is about a 5 or 6...about on a par with French.

I´m a native Spanish speaker and no, I find it easy, easy plurals, no genders, no conjugations, maybe you should check the 4 cases that German has, or the weird plurals with no rules that people have to memorize, and the 3 genders thing with also no rules.

I think the sound depends on the country and the region, I like the american accent from California though.. and find it hard to understand australians and people from scotland, the only tough side that English has if you ask me.. (at least for Spanish speakers) is that the word order changes a lot cause it´s a germanic language, and also its heavily irregular pronuciation that can be a pain in the a.ss, otherwise the rest is easy.

Well, English is quite easy concerning its grammar, syntax, pronunciation is also not so hard to pick up. If to put some effort you can achieve the intermediate level in a short time. BUT! It's so hard to master it further, to a native-like level, almost impossible I would say. With intermediate English you are already 'well-packed' with all necessary vocabulary and structures, you just need to properly choose between them in different situations. That can make the feeling that it's enough for you and you can stop here... until you come across some more difficult cases (like good fiction literature, or science texts or quality articles in journals, etc.). And you realize that English is a much richer language with vaaaast vocabulary, and you have to spend all your life to approximate that level of fluency.

I would mark out at least four difficult things about English:

1) Huge vocabulary, a lot of synonyms (say, for almost every action there are at least two verbs - of English and Latin origin).

2) Idioms / phrasal verbs.

3) You cannot always tell what is the pronunciation of the word just from how it's written.

4) Native intonation is quite hard to imitate.

So, you can say English is easy if your goal is just to achieve the conversational level. And it's really hard if you want to gain native-like fluency which means using diverse vocabulary and structures and comprehending complex texts.

I am a Chinese. Based on my over 10 year experience of learning English, English is not as difficult as most Chinese English learners think, only if good approaches are followed.

among the various approaches, the most important is practicing as much as possible, and it wouldn't be better, if you have opportunities to speak to native speakers.

www.talkeer.com is a website platform matching language learners, they practice in ways of language exchange, and learner-tutor. more important, it is for free.

I actually found it relatively easy to learn the mechanics of it. Writing and grammar rules... the pronunciation eh... not so much. There's not really much to learn about English really. Most of the time you just basically sound it out to spell. For Spanish for instance, you have to learn about accents, and this special type of syllables, that go on and on. From a scale from 1 to ten, one being Spain's version of Spanish and ten being the Click sound language of the African tribes, I'd say it was about a three, but then again that's just me, im a genius

I am a language major and speak 3 languages,

Any language is difficult to learn just by reading books, however...English is one of those languages that everyone has access to... there's movies in English everywhere, songs, tourist, and most countries teach English as a second language...so there's always excellent chances to practice speaking and listening to it

But yes, I still find it very hard to understand spoken English due to vowels & consonants being skipped in sounds and things like that, my husband who only speaks English gets very frustrated when I ask him to repeat himself ... but even to speak, I find my tongue tossed every now and then...

My other languages are Spanish and Japanese, SPanish being my native, I find Japanese much easier to listen to and to speak to, I can talk extremely fast in Japanese and not get my tongue tossed as in English... of course, writing seems hard, but its actually very simple in rules, and only hard in memorization

hope that helps

Easy to speak but im sure its hard to write cuz the spelling rules are applied from latin, greek and german so its a bastard language