On the other hand german pronunciation is mostly predictable (compared to english and french at least) and the only thing that's really tricky to learn in your

On the other hand german pronunciation is mostly predictable (compared to english and french at least) and the only thing that's really tricky to learn in your list is gender. For the rest, the german case system is really not that hard (especially compared to languages like russian, arabic and many others). I doubt you have 44 forms for "a" in german, although I haven't counted them lately... Quite frankly I don't think language difficulty is the key here, otherwise we'd be having this conversation in spanish. I'm a native french speaker and I think the only reason english is easier to learn than german for us is that english is basically everywhere around us.