When I was a grad student in Scotland one of my flatmates was a German economist who would go on hilarious rants about how insane the English was to learn. I have heard that apart from Finnish (which if I understand correctly has grammatical rules that are followed, jut a LOT of them) English tends to be the trickiest European language for adults to learn as a second language because there are so many exceptions.

Or should I say 'since' there are so many exceptions...