Is the English language more difficult or does it have more confusing elements in it than other languages?
In my observation of many foreigners, both here in the USA and at home in their native lands, English is indeed one of the most difficult languages to learn--especially as an adult. However, the primary difficulty is one that you folks have only mentioned in passing: phonetics.
English has a much larger set of phonemes than most other languages. Obviously our huge set of eleven vowels is a problem. In my not-quite-professional study I find that to be the largest of any major language. Many people can't even
hear the difference between "bat" and "bet" or "cot" and "caught," much less pronounce them. And of course it doesn't help at all that both American and British regional accents play fast and loose with vowels: in some places, "cot" and "caught" truly are homonyms. Not to mention, this is why the way we write vowels is ridiculous, whereas our consonants are only a little silly.
But we also have such a huge set of consonants that almost any native speaker of any other language is going to find it difficult to master at least a couple of them. Voiced and voiceless TH are very unusual phonemes which occur in a very small number of languages. The northern French, German and Scandinavian R is difficult for most people, and the American gargled version isn't much easier. The indescribable R of Mandarin Chinese is probably the most difficult at all, while the much more common flapped R of Spanish, Japanese, Russian, British English and dozens of other languages, is apparently the easiest. We Americans struggle with it, even though it's exactly the same sound we make for the T in "later" or the D in "leader."
You mention homophones, which are often (but not always) the result of our language's dual ancestry from Old High German and Medieval French. This phenomenon is considerably less common in most languages--although in Chinese, whose word units are all single syllables, there are typically ten with the same pronunciation, and this is why most "words" have at least two syllables and commonly three or more.
I suggest the comparison be made only with alphabet based languages. I would guess Chinese or Japanese would be much harder than English.
Chinese is difficult to read and write because it is simply
not phonetic. You have to know 5,000 symbols to read a newspaper and be regarded as educated.
But as I have often noted, this difficulty is balanced by the fact that the symbols haven't changed in thousands of years. So as various dialects evolved into separate languages (e.g., speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese cannot understand each other
at all) they can still read each other's writing. This relationship ensured that their grammar and syntax hasn't changed very much in all that time.
I suggest the comparison be made only with alphabet-based languages.
Alphabets are not the only phonetic transcription systems. Hebrew, Arabic and other Semitic languages only transcribe the consonants in the words, since vowels are not
phonemic, i.e., they have no bearing on the meaning of the words. This system of transcription is called an
abjad.
Many of the languages of India use an
abugida, which is a set of symbols for consonants, and each one has a set of appendages to use for the vowel that follows it, if any. In order to fit in the available space, each consonantal symbol is slightly squashed or stretched to make room for the vowel, so it's difficult for us to see the relationships.
Contrary to the comment above, the
kana writing system used in Japanese is, indeed phonetic. Each syllable has its own symbol, and there's no rhyme or reason to it. In Japanese, a syllable can only be a lone vowel or one vowel preceded by a single consonant. A lone N at the end of a word is also treated as a syllable, even though it's not. However, written Japanese tends to also incorporate about 2,000 Chinese symbols, so it's only partially phonetic. And each symbol typically has at least two different pronunciations, depending on whether it's still the original Chinese word after suffering through several centuries of phonetic changes in the hands of the Japanese, or if the word is actually translated into Japanese, in which case it may represent two or more syllables.
The Korean phonetic writing system is called
hangul. Each syllable has a central vowel, preceded by an optional consonant and an also-optional semivowel, and followed by an optional final consonant. If that isn't complicated enough, the whole group of symbols that make up a word is squashed into a square, so they can be next to each other, on top of one another, or both--which of course stretches or slims their shapes. In North Korea, this phonetic system is mandatory for all writing, but in South Korea, surnames and a very few common words can still be written in the Chinese characters that once served all of southeast Asia's languages, including Vietnamese.
