As the title says, this popped into my head while walking to my home being showered with subzero frozen rain.
Modern english is just an creole language of 5 different european languages and made super easy to mix the conflicts between those languages. Thats why its so easy to learn for most people.
That entirely depends on how you plan to use it though. If you e.g. only want to read and write or listen and speak but not combine spoken and written word the consistency of pronunciation vs. spelling matters a lot less.
For vocabulary I suppose you could also consider languages with compound words easier than languages with unique words for the same concepts, i believe Spanish doesn’t do so well there.
Yes, I would prefer to be literate.
I was actually more thinking about the use case where you e.g. only read and write online but rarely speak the language yourself and don’t watch any movies or listen to audio books or podcasts.