Any sources for this? The lack of certain complex features (eg. gendered words) does make it seem true, but English borrows from a lot of sources and is very inconsistent.

A comparison I like to make is that Japanese is one of the simplest to pronounce languages. If you learn the kana, you essentially learn all of the phonemes (there's a bit more nuance).

I'd like to know what the simplest languages are on each dimension : pronunciation (has to be Japanese), grammar, overall consistency, vocabulary complexity, writing, etc.

It would be awesome if we gradually evolved English to be easier to learn, such as in [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...