What makes English so difficult to learn?

You say its easy, and yet you write 'learned' instead of 'learnt' - a classic example.

and an ignorant American would look at British and pronounce practise (Br. spelling) like practize....

Highly unlikely.

Americans on the other hand, have been butchering it for centuries and should not be consulted when learning this language. It is, after all, English and not American.

Rubbish.  North American English is in many ways much closer to Elizabethan English than British English, Australian English and New Zealand English.

Anonymous Australian.

Well, we could say that Australian English speakers are "butchering the language": for one thing, most of you have forgotten how to prononounce your r's; your vowels are quite different earlier forms of English, and your vocabulary has shifted quite a bit.

It is, after all, English and not American.

Well, it's not Australian either.

so it is logical that the more words one knows, the more thoughts one can have.

How is that logical?  Other languages can also be quite expressive.  Just because English "has" over a million words, you have to realize that many are simply restricted to medicine; others are not in common use and would be quite incomprehensible to most people.  Just by possessing a copious amount of words (many of these so called "English words" are hardly native words, and are not understood by many people), doesn't mean that English is more expressive than other languages in all respects.

It (the spelling) was fixed 400 years ago

Yes, for the most part.  But what I don't understand, is if someone wants to simply be able to speak English (and doesn't care about reading and writing), why don't they simply use a phonetic alphabet when learning English.

though I'm convinced once upon a time it really was pronounced "kuh-ni-git"

Actually in Old and Middle English, the "k" was pronounced (but there was no "uh" after it), and the "g" was pronounced like in the word "Loch" if you put on a Scottish accent.

Or meaby something from German: einhundertfunfundzwazig (125) - this is correct spelling, there shouldn't be any spaces!!!

Well, it's easy enough to break down, and is hardly harder than onehundredtwentyfive.

You say its easy, and yet you write 'learned' instead of 'learnt' - a classic example.

"learned" and "learnt" tend to be pretty well interchangeable.

Kooyeen I agree with you about the thing that "English is not very expressive".. (I do not know it compared with Italian though ) However, If I compare it with my native tongue which is Turkish, I find it very limited too... And I think it is not a difficult language at all, and it is easy to learn because you can hear, or see English everywhere.. we are surrounded by that.. (Globalizm you know.)

As someone mentioned before, there are so much words that even the natives don't know them all.. But you don't have to know them all either.. Therefore, I think it is easy in terms of grammar (if we compared with other languages), and it can be learnt very easily because you can practise everywhere, anytime etc.

Cheers!

I believed a person of having a hard time to learn a second language, is his lack of interest.