Is English an easy language?

[An experiment. The intended audience is not clear, as is clear from how it is written. Will rewrite, maybe.]

The Czech says "no interpreting", which should be OK.
The sign has thus two messages!
Don't interpret. Bad advice.
Don't translate. Good advice.

The answer I most often hear to this question is that English is an easy language to learn, at first. You can start speaking in one or two lessons. Advanced learners of English do not fill up courses when they are offered, but if you happen to encounter one who is studying formally, in a school for example, or informally, that is they are seriously studying on their own, these students will say that to speak, read, and write English well is quite difficult (listening and comprehending is another subject to be treated separately).

All too often this question is an implied comparison. Is English easy to learn compared with (usually) one's own language? If this is the meaning, the answer is meaningless. One's native language is learned in an entirely different way from a foreign language. There are only opinions and conjectures to be made of how one learned one's own language in cultural and immersive environments, which give learning from birth or before a most seamless quality. The foreign language requires methods and materials and structured and planned unstructured activities leading to acquisition. So enough about which is easier to learn.

Is learning English easy compared with another in the same language family (e.g., German)? Yes, perhaps. A different language family (e.g., Vietnamese)? No, perhaps not. Compared with another foreign language one has already studied? Well, here it gets even more interesting. Yes and no.

If you have studied another language and know the technical ins and outs of your own, I suspect, and research should bear this out, each additional language provides a broader base with which to associate anything deemed linguistically different or new for you. In other words, the more you know languages and how they are put together and what they share between and among one another, the easier a new one will be.

One thing that makes English a bit more challenging sometimes is that it adds many new words and expressions in general and specialized versions each year. So can anyone know English perfectly? No. Just as you can't know your own unless it is geo-culturally isolated or dead, which might be the same thing.

"But in my language we have one word for what you in your language--you have to use many words."

And so what is the point? Your language is better? Or mine is for the same reason? Is one word better than many or vice versa? This is a fine objection to the value of a language, or reservation about learning one, but it is again without much merit--in my opinion. Linguists and others should weigh in on this one. Here is my take.

Each language is translatable in that you can say with your word or words what I can say in my language, and I can do the same the other way round. The so-called lost nuances in a translation can always be articulated, and so if these are important or critical, an astute speaker-translator will fill in the missing pieces. If, however, I prefer to use a foreign word where an abundance of my own would substitute, plus I like the sound and sense, or the "je ne sais quoi" of the chosen foreign word or expression, so be it. I as a speaker in an increasingly international and multi-lingual world can use what says it best for me. And when I just want to use a word common in my social circles, yet foreign, I will. And people do. "Quatsch!" (So much more melodic than nonsense or bullshit, don't you think?

So where do I weigh in on this question of whether English is "an easy language"? After a number of years of having taught English as a foreign language and listening to countless non-native speakers every day, English is a wonderfully colorful and communicative language but difficult to learn at the higher levels. And not many students of the language get to the most proficient levels.