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  My grandpa spoke 5 languages, told me English has the most confusing rules and exceptions to those rule as well as silent letters.
  It’s commonly called the most confusing and difficult by people who learn it as a 2nd language. >
  
  One of the most consistent thing about English is its inconsistency. >
  
  The Defense Language Institute has done a lot of work on measuring the difficulty of language learning and rates them on a Category scale with Category 1 being the easiest to acquire and Category 5 being the most difficult to acquire.
  Arabic is considered a Category 4 language by the Defense Language Institute for it’s complicated syntax, dynamic spelling, multiple noun perspectives, and its use of measured verbs.
  Mandarin is considered a Category 4 because of its non-alphabetic script and the use of tones to change the meaning of the words.
  English is considered a Category 5 because it’s grammar and pronunciation rules are shit and completely inconsistent. >
  
  English is like organic chemistry ..... There are more exceptions than actual rules. >
  
  Small. Smaller. Smallest.
  Large. Larger. Largest.
  I think I got it.
  Good. Gooder. Goodest?
  No? 
  So I have to remember the rule, how to use the rule, then when to ignore the rule and what to do when we ignore it? This is going to be embarrassing. >
  
  If you were learning English in conjunction with a lot of other languages, you could be forgiven for thinking it was rooted in that language. 
  English is an amalgam and contains words with roots in just about every language family there is. Sofa is Arabic. Cavalier is rooted in French while ketchup derives from an archaic Chinese dialect. There's heavy influence from Romance languages, ancient Greek and, of course, Latin. Grammatically it's Germanic but you'd never know it without enough training to recognize how.
  The spelling only makes it worse. Take the "th" sound. You don't think about it and probably don't even realize it but there are two distinct "th" sounds you use. You can't know which one to use without hearing the word first or are really familiar with the phonetic alphabet. But unlike many languages, English wasn't updated or simplified. The most common vowel sound isn't even used to spell a single word and there are a ton of words with silent letters. 
  There are rules but because the language is an amalgam, the rules cover shorter components rather than being universal. You know that knife is spelled with a k but nobody who hadn't seen and heard the word together would know that. And then there are the contractions, pronouns, phrasal verbs and so on. Why would it be correct to say, "to whom" but incorrect to say, "to who"? Sure, we do it anyway but we're wrong to do so. 
  Now, with all of that said, English does offer at least one advantage over many languages in that it tends to be very precise simply because of its structure. If I say, "He was in a class all by himself" you know that the person we're talking about is male. You know that we're talking about a single class. That's information that many languages don't impart in their structure. Chinese, for example, doesn't usually have pluralization or articles. It also isn't gendered (although neither is English for the most part)
  In any case, the point is that you're not viewing the language from the perspective of somebody learning it as a second language. They report that it is very difficult to master (obviously not all of them and it depends on when you start learning the language, of course) >
  
  
  Why would it be correct to say, "to whom" but incorrect to say, "to who"? Sure, we do it anyway but we're wrong to do so. 
  
  That's an incredible straightforward part of English though. Cases are not an uncommon feature of language, and in most languages with cases every noun is different for different cases. German has 4 cases, Latin 6 (seven if you count the locative), Tamil 9, and Finnish has a whopping 15 different cases. 
  English only has 3 cases and in the vast majority of words the nominative and accusative are the same, the only exceptions being extremely common words like I/me or he/him.  The genitive in English is also very simple, just add an 's at the end of the word, there aren't many exceptions to that. Most languages with cases are orders of magnitude more complicated than who/whom.
  I think it's telling that people always resort to the spelling to explain what makes English hard to learn, because the language itself isn't actually that remarkable. There are some unusual things, Þorn is not a common sound, it has relics of an older almost entirely defunct case system (who/whom), it has a massive amount of loanwords (though the grammar is Germanic and so are most of the common words, it's not a bastard child of multiple languages like many believe). But almost every language has some unusual features. Lots of people like to think of English as being some sort of unique, one of a kind special snowflake, but it just isn't.
  English spelling is obviously harder than a lot of other languages, but not uniquely. There's plently of languages with irregular spelling, some languages don't even have standarized spelling at all. 
  Then there are languages like Mandarin, which has more than 50,000 characters (though only a few thousand are needed for fluency), tradition and simplified characters, and also pinyin. That's also very challenging, albiet in a different way from English. Japanese has two different syllabaries for the same set of syllables (hiranga and katakana), and also thousands of Kanji symbols, and Romanji. 
  Difficulty learning a second language is largely due to how similar it is to your native language. That's why for English speakers Dutch is very easy to learn and Mandarin is very hard. This also works the other way around. >
  
  Exactly, thank you for explaining my point more eloquently than I can lol >
  
  Wish I could give those people few examples of my native language (Bosnian), then they would see what is actually a confusing and difficult to learn.