so you mean why has normal english got u's and american english not? well i guess americans just had to be different

Easier to learn, harder to spell.  You're talking about really different things here, there's no wonder you're disagreeing.  

But if that's your criterion, then why is English harder than Japanese or other ideographic languages, that have a unique symbol for each word?  You have absolutely no damn clue how to pronounce it unless you are told, and ditto for knowing how to say it but not write it.  At least with English you can make it up and get the idea across most of the time.   

Chinese and similar languages are different for a completely different reason. Chinese has 40,000 characters, while English has 26, and French/Italian/Spanish have a little over 30. In Roman languages, combinations of these 26 letters make up words, and in Chinese, combinations of 40,000 characters make up words. And which is easier to write, "a" or "醫"?

And where exactly does this turn into you disagreeing with me about other languages using Han characters also being harder than English?  

The difficulty of learning a language depends entirely from what you speak in the first place. for example I speak English, it would be very easy for me to learn German but hard for me to learn Mandarin.

Somebody that speaks French could learn Italian without much trouble, but Japanese would be extremely hard for them.

I see that. More examples: "hood" and "blood", or "them" and "theme".

In my opinion, Chinese is more difficult to learn because:

1. You must learn a new way of reading.

2. You must learn a new way of writing.

3. You must differentiate between 4 (more or less, depending on the variant) ways to pronunciate the same phoneme (for instance, the classic example: "mā", "mother"; "má", "hemp"; "mǎ", "horse"; "mà", "swear".

However, Final-Fan pointed out something true: if you already know the ideograms, it will be easier to learn than other languages.

Glad I could oblige.

@ Baroque_Dude: although familiar ideograms may help learn a new language, I don't think most of them have similar meanings.

English and the romance languages have "false friends" as the exception to the rule; I could be wrong but I think it's the other way around for Chinese/Japanese/etc. (Mandarin and Cantonese, obviously, are most likely not that way.)

I don't understand how anybody can say, that English is a hard language to learn.

In my opinion it's by far the easiest language in Europe. German has much more exceptions than English + different genders like "der, die, das" except of "the" and those even used for things. Like "Der Mond" (=moon=male). So no, it won't be very easy for you to learn German.

Japanese is probably easier than English, due to less grammar rules, but as it was stated before, the writing is different, which makes it harder to learn.

Chinese is a tonal language, so not only the speaking of a word, but how you pronounce it defines a word (and the writing as well).

French is definitely harder then English, exceptions in English are a joke compared to that.

Latin: Just talk about grammar and exceptions and English shrinks to a little baby language (at least it's alive)

And those are just examples of the languages I've learned (except for Chinese) and they are all way harder than English.

I know. I said that just in case that some Chinese "dialect" shares the same pronunciation for its ideograms. By the way, some people refuse to call them dialects, because they say that those are different languages.

Besides Chinese languages, Japanese shares some ideograms but they pronunciate them in a completely different way.