i think it would depend, i mean i can't believe it would be easier for a spanish or french speaker to learn japanese than english. Every language has its good and bads points but, for me, its hard to see an argument that english is as hard as hard as japanese, mandarin, or arabic because to me those languages look like scribbles, at least spanish speakers can recognize our letters and their are some similar words to help in translating. speaking of spanish they went way overboard with their verbs, in my spanish class we learned 13 different tenses that means every verb (if you don't count vosotros) has 65 conjugations, 65! that's insane!