It is and it isn't, in my experience teaching ESL. The basics are incredibly easier, as students receive the benefit of cognates and (at least some) similar constructs. However, there's an interesting stage, right around the beginning of intermediate where students tend to become judgemental of the target language: there's a lot of frustrated "well, why doesn't English do it this way?" (It doesn't help at all that English is such a bastardized and inconsistent tongue that their native language's way of doing [whatever] often is more logical / concise / beautiful!) Some students get stuck there and never progress.

I recall very few, if any, Asian-language speakers hitting that particular speedbump. It's like they're prepared for English to be so different from the start that they've already made a psychological shift to English-mode that other learners may struggle to negotiate.