From my traveling overseas and such and dealing with a lot of ESL people I've come to understand and believe that English is one of the more difficult languages to learn because there are so many idioms (by far the most in any language), colloquialisms, and rule nuances.
Yes, you must conjugate verbs in spanish and follow gender rules, but these rules are pretty straight forward and actually make the language easier to learn and understand. In essence Spanish is a more structured language.
To say there is no debate on this...........and that Spanish has been deemed conclusively more difficult by scholars is well.....................seriously?
yeah you are right gramps.. its just that its really easy for people of latin/germanic based languages to pick up poor quality pigeon english..
for a russian or chinese person etc its completely alien and they could learn anything as easily..
its so subjective on so many levels because of the backgorund of so many languages, to say that its proven is well stupid..
and a french/portuguese/italian would be able to speak spanish to a higher level than english imo..