As I have been studying English, I now have some insight about studying English.

People may think English is "easy." Speaking English is not special, learning the English language is quite easy, bilinguals are not special, etc.

These pictures are not true, I think. Rather, you would need much effort to acquire decent English skills, unless you were a specially gifted one in language learning.

But I have to confess that it is I myself who (still) have such kind of image regarding English. Don't blame me. This image may be somewhat rife in Japan. I am one under such influence. (But there is a positive aspect in this prejudice. You won't be unnecessarily intimidated by the subject, unlike such is widely seen in mathematics for example.)

Why did I have this deceptive image about English? The thought process from which the falsity arose could be as follows.

You have learnt your native language before you notice it. So it seems like you have acquired your native language with ease. So you infer that language learning is easy.

But think of how much time it took for you to be able to use the language. Behind a 12-year-old child who speaks Japanese, there is a learning period of 12 years of the language, for example. This implies how much time it takes to learn a language.

Plus, there are hundreds of millions of people who speak English in the Anglosphere, as a matter of course. Meanwhile, for example, experts of mathematics are far rarer in number. So you may expect that mathematics is harder to learn but English is not.

But, then, how many people in Japan are there who mastered the Armenian language for example? Maybe the number is less than that of experts of mathematics.