English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)

Neither is Polish or Estonian. What is your point?

Dubbing / subtitling isn't everything, although it certainly helps. According to the theories of language acquisition, it is processing of linguistic input (connecting form to meaning to be able to understand the meaning) that makes the internal, unconscious representation of language to develop.

Subtitling movies and TV shows essentially gives more opportunities to encounter linguistic input. However, as the viewers are able to get the meaning from the subtitles only, they don't necessarily PROCESS the foreign language. Some do, so the mileage varies a lot.

(Watching without subtitles will force you process the meaning – or if the difficulty level is too high, just frustrate and ignore it. Or process partially.)

I find that even more than TV shows, kids these days are learning English from games – in Finland, they don't translate games at all, so there's even greater incentive to actually try to understand the English input.

Because we don't use dubbing, English is way more prevalent. Most kids have a somewhat basic grasp of English before being taught in school. Years of hearing English also made it easier to learn in school. You already know how to pronounce many words, it's also less foreign because you grew up with it. With French, you learn it in school and when you go home.. That's it, no more French influences. With English, you turn on the tv or radio and you're passively learning.

Personally, French was always a chore, something solely associated with school. English was fun, something you actively used.

> I mostly hear the Mexican accent. When I hear Argentinian or Cuban Spanish, I have no fucking clue what's going on. Does that mean Spanish is phonetically broken?

No, it just means that you need more exposure. That very same thing happened to me while learning english (as my 3rd language after Spanish and Catalan [0]). I started to interact and shared flat with people from USA, England, Wales, Australia, Ireland, etc... For instance I wasn't able to differentiate between Scottish and Australian, only between American English and non-American English. Now I'm quite good at it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language

English isn't unique by any means in that people from different countries speak different dialects which can sometimes be marginally difficult to understand. In fact, this is how new languages are created in the first place. At one point Italy, France and Romania all spoke Vulgar Latin. And French used to be considered the lingua franca to such and extent that it's in the damned name of the thing. But no one complains that the Portugese have difficulty understanding the Spanish who can't understand the French who can't understand the Italians who can't understand the Romanians. I've been to a few different English-speaking countries now and I can understand everyone's English just fine unless they're from a rural area. Doesn't matter if it's rural Ireland or rural Georgia, I'll have to ask them to put on a fake accent, no matter how poor it is.

English is not particularly strange or unique on most measures. Phonetically it has a few unusual sounds, but every language has one or two (and our most odd sound "th" is found in everything from medieval Japanese to ancient Greek). Grammatically English approaches an analytic language, though nothing quite like Chinese. That means we have fairly sophisticated syntax (meaning attributed to the order of words), but our morphology (the actual words changing according to grammatical meaning like for tense or plurality) is very simple. People from countries where the speak languages with all sorts of genitive and ablative cases with verb agreement on prepositions with an animacy hierarchy (I'm exaggerating here, obviously) seem to see English as simple.

Of course, English isn't particularly well-suited to be a lingua franca. If anything our shift toward analyticism is more of a result of England being repeatedly conquered in it's early settlement by Germanic tribes followed by English speakers repeatedly conquering everyone else, while embracing multiculturalism. But like most lingua francas, they gain status because of their economic importance and then you have to learn them simply because they've become the lingua franca.

I am not optimistic on the idea that a language should emerge that is actually well-suited and designed to be a lingua franca. Esperanto has been around for, what, over a hundred years now or something? And I'm sure Amiga was technically superior to IBM and in a thousand other format wars the technically superior option never took hold.

I'm just glad that I don't have to learn the bastard version of Latin that has grown up in academia and instead my own native language is the standard. There's very little you can do to convince me that an 8-syllable compound word formed from the roots of a language that did not allow compounding using word meanings that are grossly different from their original meaning for a common, everyday concept or thing for the sake of "universal standard" is a superior method of doing things.