English isn’t the best example of a language with a really great phonetic alphabet. Languages with recent spelling reforms such as Spanish or Russian would be much better picks. Regardless even seeing “enough” gives a person a good idea of where to go: e is either eh or ee; n is always pronounced n; o is either o or a; it’s just the gh that gives real trouble. That is still a lot better than seeing a symbol and having no idea where to start.
Plurals are a very weak form of noun declinations and very easy to learn. True noun declination based on the position in the sentence only exists in a few personal pronouns and is all but dead elsewhere. In fact this issue causes plenty of native English speakers grief in learning who v whom, a dying pronoun declination.
@juillet
@sweetlacecharm
Even if you know Vietnamese, you would still find learning any language with an alphabet easier to read and write than Chinese.
With that said, if you know Japanese or Vietnamese then I would say there is enough shared similarity through loan words , tonal language (Vietnamese) or writing system (Japanese) where learning Chinese actually makes sense. I don’t believe that is a the case for the Spanish speaker OP.
Most people do not go around trying to learn various languages and ranking their difficulty. So of course a lot of people will say English is hard because it is not their native language. Even when learning that person’s own language is objectively much more difficult.