Difficulty of learning english..?

G'day everyone..
As a native English speaker, I'm often reminded of the how in the English language there seem to be so many exceptions to grammatical rules, or of strange methods of spelling, for example cough, versus rough, versus plough..
or
wright, versus rite, versus right,..
Because of this, we're told that English is a difficult language to learn.

I'm just wondering how hard non-native speakers found English to learn. Does the lack of a gender system make it easier / harder? Are the inconsistencies in spelling / grammar difficult? What about irregular verbs...

My feeling is that all languages would have these inconsistencies to some degree...(wasn't it Mark Twain who said that in German there are more irregular verbs than regular verbs???), and in fact English is not necessarily an especially difficult language to learn.

Firstly, I'm interested in the thoughts of European (French, German, Italian, Spanish etc etc) speakers on this, and..

especially of other languages (Asian, African, Native American etc etc)

Thanks all, Stupot