Michelle I'm not that smart ;). I'm normal person who is not a moron :D.
It's not awfully tough. Obviously I will have more problems learning Chinese (they have like 9 dialects that are official though and about 5 or 4 words to say 'many' depending on the things that you are talking about, in our language it's just one) or Arabic or Japanese.
However just as
Betty said there are either no rules in English or for every rule there are like 20-30 exceptions and in the end I forget the rule in order to memorize the exceptions.
Now I'm math person and languages are not my strength, so I learn through logic and the things have to make sense and well either my English teacher wasn't that good or there are too many exceptions in English so I had to find my own logic behind those exceptions which takes time.
Of course one of the reasons for that difficulty might be the fact that English is the second foreign language I've tried to learn, so yeah I didn't have experience. However I have to say I studied French in elementary school for only three years and I might not remember the words that much, but the rules I still remember 10 years later. And the other two languages that I studied - Spanish and German have rules that are simpler to follow.
Shelby in all fairness I think that the Americans had tried to simplify a bit the language. I've heard that in the beginning it was even more complex.
I have coworker at work that have problems with the fact that some words in English have more than one meaning and they have nothing in common. Like fair - It might be just because someone is fair or not, or it I might just want to invite someone to go the fair.
And something for the comedy relief:
http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000...2652.strip.gif