You Should Know

Boy it's a hard language. The English has a few quirks but it is an EASY language compared to most, including French

Man, as a native English speaker, I totally disagree with this. We are, as I emphasized in another comment, a fucking mess phonetically, and a lot of this is ironically because English plundered so much from French (among other languages). So much of English you just have to "know" on a nearly case-by-case basis, and I imagine the internal systems I use to subconsciously keep track of these inconsistencies are a terrifying web of spaghetti. The conjugation is fucked six ways from Sunday, there are idioms out the ass (see the ones I'm unintentionally using here), there's sooooo much slang, and there's practically a bottomless pit of words – so much so (in combination with how common it is as a second language) that Wikipedia maintains a simplified English version using a list of only the 1000 most common words.

I can't say I've learned French, but even accounting for how much I already accidentally know of it (knowing more obscure English words aids a lot in translation to the point I can often read sentences with knowing just a handful of basic French connective words), I'd bet it's a ton easier. The main thing I'd hate, like I do with Spanish, is gendered nouns (god, they're so fucking superfluous), but I'd still say it beats the weird peculiarities of English.

Most non-native speakers, to my understanding, would consider English quite hard to learn, even when factoring in all the English media they're surrounded by growing up.

Yeah, if there's a new lingua franca in 25 years (which would be strange, because the proliferation of increasingly highly accurate LLM translation would seemingly add pressure in favor of whatever the status quo is), I would bargain on Mandarin. And that's if, which I seriously doubt – even assuming the US completely fucks up the next 20 years as badly as the last 10 and China just dominates the world economy by a vast margin. English is one of the hardest major languages to learn; ironically, the globalism that let it proliferate arguably isn't helping a total beginner as English increasingly pulls in loanwords.

What's a language that's even harder to learn? Mandarin. English is a fucking mess phinetically, but at least it doesn't have tens of thousands of characters and an extreme emphasis on particular intonation. Japanese has kanji, sure, but there's a foundation in the form of kanas which are easy to learn and are phonetic. Especially with English entrenched as a secondary language, pivoting to teaching Mandarin would need an enormous incentive compared to China's incentive to just, like, use an LLM to translate messages etc. bound to non-Madarin-speaking countries.