French is pretty tough, too. French is a very degraded form of Latin (with things from Celtic and Germanic languages added). Once you know the roots of words, German and the Slavic language aren’t so terrible, but French strayed from its Latin roots. Spanish vocabulary is closer to Latin and clearer. That’s my opinion anyway, but I took French in high school and didn’t put in much effort.
“Basic English” was an idea about teaching a simple English vocabulary and translating everything into that. What the creators didn’t understand was that those simple words had to be combined in unexpected idiomatic ways to say anything. The different uses of the word “up” cited in the article illustrate the problem.
When I was a youngster, I sometimes looked in the dictionary for interesting things. The word that that really stood out was “strike”.
You can strike, enact a blow, upon a face.
You get a strike when you fail to strike a baseball.
A strike in bowling is knocking down all the pins.
One form of labor action through a union is a strike.
The strike of a match is to cause friction in such a way as to ignite it.
A striking woman merits a second look.
A strike price has to do with stock trades.
etc. etc.