Why do people talk about some languages being "hard" or "easy" for English speakers or any speakers to learn?

I just do not get this conversation. I took German in college when we were forced to take 3 years of a language. Why did I choose this? I knew it would be easier than Chinese and I did not want French or Spanish. I knew German would be easier than Russian and Portuguese. Japanese and Korean? No clue but I assumed they were in the middle. I rarely hear anyone talk about Arabic or Euskadi. <br><br>So to make a long story short, while I found a lot of German to be learning, it was a lot like English. You learn the words and you learn the grammar and you learn which words go with which grammar. If you do not learn and use those words it is more difficult. I also did not have a lot of trouble with the grammar. Milch is milk, Wasser is water. In English you need to learn when to simply use the past tense and when to change the verb. In German you need to learn when to simply use the past tense and when to change the verb, as well as when to use du/Sie and ihr/Sie. So is there any language that is just easier? And can you really compare different learners? My mind can easily keep straight different verb conjugations; my friend struggles with it. She can easily hear all the tones in Mandarin and she can speak them, I can hear the tones but I can not speak them. My friend who speaks Russian can easily hear the difference in the "r" sounds and "l" sounds; I can not. <br><br>I think English is one of the rare languages where we *can not* say that everything is different from the learner's native tongue. I know Scots might be a dialect of English, but if you can not understand it you can say it is a different language. I do not know if Hindi/Urdu are distinct languages or dialects of the same language. But English is used as the shared language in many countries. I learned German and some countries it is official, some it is recognized as minority and some it is not.<br><br>So why do we need to say that some languages are "hard" or "easy"?<br><br>Edit: I should also add that I have lived in the US for almost my entire life and I can not hear the difference in "cot" and "caught" and "collar" and "caller". I can hear a difference in the intonation though.