Possibly basic English is not very difficult. First of all, it lost a lot of inflections in the course of its history. Hence, you needn't learn declensions and conjugations.
But if you want to achieve a very high level of knowledge, it will take years and years, your whole life. English is the language (it is a fact proved by linguists) which possesses the greatest vocabulary compared with other languages (I mean the number of lexical items - the corpus of its wordstock). New words and phrases emerge daily. Also there are such phenomena as extensive polysemy, idioms, phrasal verbs.
It is an international language, of course, because of the role the U.S.A. plays in modern life. I would recommend a wonderful book - Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language by D.Crystal.