relatively easy

Very incomplete list of things about English which are not easy:

• The sheer amount of vowel phonemes
  • French and German do “a lot of vowels” properly
  • Sometimes they’re diphthongs
  • Complete with arcane allophony
• Stress timing ⇒ vowel reduction, weak forms
• Adjective order???
  • Not actually difficult, it’s just weird that it even exists.
• Sequence of tenses
  • Actually might be worse than Latin
• The verbal system is messy, identical forms can specify different tenses/aspects/moods and can be treated differently by the syntax accordingly
  • There are somewhere between 2 and 12 tenses, and I’m genuinely not sure which is it.
  • English verbs are very expressive, but the forms are mandatory. Other languages also have a lot of markers, but they’re often optional.
• Morphology is pretty easy for anyone who speaks a language other than the famously analytic Chinese, I guess.
• Not technically a part of the spoken language, but spelling (at least three spelling systems not even trying to masquerade as one + GVS, also grammatical gender but only sometimes, e.g. blond/blonde).

Some things are not difficult, but I find them endearing:

• English is really afraid of hiatus and will do anything to avoid it
• The GVS messed things up so hard that most English speakers (outside of Scotland and parts of England and Ireland) can’t even borrow monophthongs properly.
• Do-support: to negate a verb, you need another verb, but the new verb has exactly zero meaning (but some verbs don’t require do-support).

Not contesting the practicality though, and I agree that “dumb” is meaningless when it comes to language.