More than 14, but half of them are just adding "have" to the mirror form. Still it's not the number of tenses that matters, English has most of them, but the way they're constructed with terminations instead of auxiliary verbs (will, shall, would). Oh, and also: we will understand you quite well even if you talk with badly broken syntax, just try to learn vocabulary.
Extranger sports players use to talk very soon in an intelligible way.
I don't think so... in general. It's much more difficult for us because we have five very defined vowels, compared to the dozen or so in English. Until you practice a lot, it's easy to get lost in beer, bear, bird, beard, etc.
Distinguishing every tense as a distinct entity is usually a matter of methodology. It usually is more practical just to understand the logic behind. I.e. I consider the way I was taught English at school (past indefinite is this, future perfect continuous is that etc) rather inefficient, I could explain the whole system to my past self in a much more intuitive way a lot faster. You also don't need such a huge number of tenses for everyday life. And of course I don't claim I've learnt all the irregular verbs, just a humble portion (and I already can't name a single of them now as years have passed - practice is vital, zero practice = you forget 99.9% of what you've learnt).
