English is relatively easy to learn, but not to master (2018)
Something I&#x27;ve heard fairly consistently from people who&#x27;ve learned English as a second language is that it&#x27;s relatively easy to learn English to a basic or intermediate level, since English grammar is relatively simple (no genders, no cases, simple verbs, etc), but taking your English from intermediate to advanced is much harder because of all the weird quirks, irregularities, idioms, phrasal verbs, inconsistent spelling etc..<p>My experience of learning several Asian languages as a native English speaker is kind of the opposite - the initial learning stage is very hard and it took me a long time to get to a point where people would understand me at all. But once I got over the initial hump, things progressed from &quot;basic&quot; to &quot;intermediate&quot; quite smoothly. (I never stuck around for long enough to get from &quot;intermediate&quot; to &quot;advanced&quot; though, so who knows.)