Reading and writing the alphabet, yes. The grammar and pronunciation rules for speakers (not the pronunciation itself)? English is quite a bit more difficult than most people realize.
You can learn Pinyin in a few days, which is sufficient for you to pronounce any Mandarin Chinese romanized into Pinyin. Chinese grammar is fairly simple compared to Latin languages. Whereas English is a rats nest of special-need-to-memorize pronunciation rules.
Most of the real difficulty people experience with Chinese comes from the shock of learning the characters.
Coming from Dutch, I found English easier than German. Some people say German is so close, it's mutually intelligible with Dutch: not only is it not, I even find it much harder than English.
At least from my perspective, someone who knows a language very close to another and still found English easier than this other language, English is easy.
Pronunciation is indeed quite a lot of learning by heart, but it's not hard to get used to if you got the rest down. Of course, this might be much harder for Chinese, I wouldn't know.
Two things:
1. As an English-native-speaker who also learned German I find that I can mostly understand spoken and written Dutch through my German. I think part of your difficulty there is that it is closer to your native language where you have very tight internal rules about how the language should be, so get caught up in those differences. On my side my internal rules on German are relatively loose, so Dutch mostly fits in there.
2. One good-sized chunk of the messiness of English pronunciation (vs. written words) is actually the fault of the Dutch. Prior to the printing press spelling was more an art than a science, and the same transcribed book could be found with different spellings (especially true in different regions). Since the Dutch were the first ones with the printing press, many English books of the time were printed there, and the Dutch printers made some pretty arbitrary decisions on how they thought English should be spelled (e.g. the 'h' in 'ghost'). There was a similar effect from French scribes when they invaded England.
Now my no means were they they only ones to mess up English (read up on "The Great Vowel Shift" if you want a headache), but they did their part.
What an amazing illustration of how humor can be lost across language boundaries. You have to have experience in both English and Chinese to know how hilarious that statement is. It's genius to write it in English and deliver it so deadpan to readers who won't know to laugh out loud when they see it.
9 strokes is a lot in Chinese, but relatively few in English. And despite what anyone says, you can't learn English using phonics or any other method except bulk memorization. In English, every word and every one of its derivatives has to be memorized. Past tense, possessive, plural, everything has to be memorized. Nobody bats an eye at this. Learning 8 strokes for "tree" is easy, but the 4 strokes for the Chinese equivalent is hard. 12 strokes for "water" is easy. 5 strokes in Chinese is hard. Oh, and throw on 4 more strokes in English if you turn it into a verb and use the past tense, "watered". Unless you write "did water" instead and split them up with a noun in between: "did you water". What a disaster.
I am a native English speaker. I like to think I am decent at it. Better than most of the people with whom I speak in person. But did I just use "whom" correctly? And did I just start a sentence with "but"? And "and"? And leave out the subject? Is this even proper English?
